Animal Ethical Mourning: Why Animal Grief Is Disenfranchised

Grief is an emotional response to loss. What we mourn is personal, but we don’t fully control how others perceive it. Society arbitrates our grief’s timing and expression, ultimately deciding what’s worth mourning. When a loss falls outside those expectations, the grief can become disenfranchised, meaning that it’s socially deemed invalid or insignificant.

Animal-related grief consistently falls into this category. People grieve non-human animals, yet this mourning is barely acknowledged or studied beyond companion animals. “Real” grief is often presumed to require a direct relationship. However, people also grieve animals they’ve never met, including those harmed by industrial farming, hunting, climate change, or other human activities.

The authors of this paper call this overlooked experience “animal ethical mourning,” a grief defined through moral commitment rather than personal attachment. They argue that it already shares the characteristics grief researchers use to understand other forms of bereavement. Using an ecological grief framework, the paper examines how this mourning appears across three contexts — companion animals, wild animals, and farmed animals — and proposes two new concepts to better articulate the experience.

Loss And Grief Beyond Humans

Traditional grief research focused mostly on human death. The field has since expanded to recognize that people can mourn many kinds of losses, including non-death losses like identities and futures. Loss is further understood as having a domino effect, where a primary loss can trigger secondary losses that reshape other parts of a person’s life.

Not everyone experiences the same things as loss, and not every loss produces grief. What people mourn reveals what they value. Animals therefore don’t need to be universally valued for grief over their loss to be legitimate.

Like other forms of bereavement, animal grief’s intensity depends on the relationship to the loss, how it occurred, the mourner’s traits, social attitudes, and culture. The grief can be delayed, inhibited, suppressed, or repressed — sometimes unconsciously. Guilt is also a recurring feature of animal ethical mourning. When grieving, people naturally review their own role in what happened. Animal suffering is so often inflicted by human decisions and systems that the guilt can be augmented, complicating the grieving process.

Animal Grief Through An Ecological Lens

One of the authors has developed an ecological grief framework, which outlines the different ways that people respond to environmental degradation. In this paper, the authors use the framework’s categories of loss to structure their analysis of animal ethical mourning:

• Tangible loss: observable, physical loss such as a death, injury, or absence
• Intangible loss: changes to identity, trust, safety, relationships, or meaning
• Ambiguous loss: loss without clear answers or closure
• Nonfinite loss: ongoing loss without a defined endpoint

Certain losses are commonly associated with certain types of grief. For example, disenfranchised grief is more likely when the loss is ambiguous or intangible. Responses to loss vary from person to person and loss to loss. The framework charts patterns found, not predicted reactions.

Companion Animal Grief

People forge genuine attachments to companion animals that are sometimes akin to human relationships. Research shows that stronger attachment predicts more intense grief. The tangible loss of a companion animal can unfurl into a series of intangible losses that disrupt the bereaved’s routine, role, sense of stability, and social networks.

The circumstances of loss affect how the grief is experienced. When a companion animal goes missing, people may stay trapped between hope and grief because there’s no certainty about what happened. Long illness can begin the mourning process before death occurs, referred to as anticipatory grief. Traumatic or preventable losses may complicate grief; guilt haunts people’s reflections on decisions, euthanasia, timing, or whether more could’ve been done.

Companion animal grief is the most socially accepted form of animal-related grief, but it’s still underestimated by a society that views animals as replaceable. Mourning can be branded excessive when people continue the bond through memorials or don’t swiftly “bounce back.”

Disenfranchisement is even more severe for animals like birds, reptiles, and fishes. Cultural species hierarchies grant them less moral standing than dogs or cats, making grief for them easier to dismiss.

Wild Animal Grief

Climate change and industrialization breed chronic uncertainty about the fate of wild animals. Wild animal grief is widespread, though less studied. It comes from repeated exposure to injured or dead animals and biodiversity loss. People encounter these losses firsthand — through rescue efforts or encountering roadkill, for example — or vicariously through media and research.

Rarely can we verify the loss of a specific animal or species, preventing emotional resolution. Rather than a single event, the losses accumulate across multiple timelines. Someone may simultaneously grieve the extinct passenger pigeon, declining monarch butterfly populations, and the possible disappearance of polar bears, experiencing what’s known as chronic sorrow.

Groups whose professional or cultural identities are inextricably tied to these animals can endure a loss of self or hope for the future. Conservationists and scientists may experience dwindling populations as a career failure, whereas Indigenous communities suffer the loss as a blow to cultural continuity and spiritual traditions.

Modern societies are more detached from nature; they routinely sanction wild animal casualties as acceptable costs of development and recreation. Those who mourn wild animals often withhold their grief to bypass potential judgment and disagreement.

Farmed Animal Grief

The systematic raising and slaughter of billions of animals in factory farms creates a scale of loss that makes grief over farmed animals uniquely difficult to resolve. Since the responsible systems are embedded in everyday life, the resulting grief is continuous and lacks the typical boundaries needed for closure.

Most people will never set foot in a factory farm. Public awareness is mediated through content like journalism, documentaries, and advocacy footage. The authors link awareness of systemic animal suffering to moral injury, a condition characterized by cumulative psychological strain. This can manifest as compassion fatigue, burnout, guilt, or helplessness.

Traumatic realizations can shatter our belief in a moral world, leading to a state of “misanthropic melancholia” where lingering grief is fueled by a disillusionment with human behavior. For some individuals, that proves galvanizing. They’re motivated to change their own behavior so as not to be a part of the suffering, or to fight it.

Identity transformations like this can come at the cost of alienation from friends and family, or ridicule. Farmed animals are culturally objectified as food. Grieving them implicitly challenges social norms; others tend to interpret it as an indictment of their own lifestyle choices.

Animal Ethical Mourning Is Unique

Existing grief theory explains much of animal ethical mourning, but some animal grief has an added social conflict. In many cases, the grief isn’t merely invalidated; it’s flat-out resisted. Grieving for animals destabilizes assumptions of human superiority and the common ways people use and enjoy them.

To better describe these dynamics, the authors introduce contested grief (someone rejects the legitimacy of your grief) and contrapuntal grief (your grief exists alongside someone else’s apathy or approval of the same harm). These terms apply most clearly to farmed and wild animals viewed as pests, assets, or resources rather than companions.

Some people use cognitive dissonance or strategic ignorance to evade the moral implications of normalized habits like hunting or eating cheeseburgers. Rejecting animals as worth grieving is less taxing than reckoning with the pleasure or convenience they derive from systems that cause animal suffering.

Takeaways

This conceptual work establishes a theoretical framework without quantifiable data to support its claims. The authors invite empirical research for animal ethical mourning and lesser-studied aspects of animal grief.

The paper avoids framing grief as purely negative. Mourning can evolve into moral outrage that drives the fight for change and a deeper commitment to animal welfare. That being said, disenfranchised animal grief can be corrosive in high-exposure roles like activism and veterinary medicine. The authors recommend formalizing support that includes open conversation, professional help, and workplace rituals to give people the structure and language to cope.