Podcast Summary: Unexplainable – "Is animal grief real?"

Date: November 17, 2025
Host: Bird Pinkerton (Vox)
Guests:

• Jennifer Vonk (Psychologist, animal cognition expert)
• Jessica Pierce (Bioethicist, animal ethics author)
• Susanna Monceau (Animal ethicist and philosopher)

Overview

This episode of Unexplainable dives into a deceptively simple question: Do animals really experience grief? Using the famous 2018 story of an orca whale mourning her dead calf as a starting point, host Bird Pinkerton explores scientific, ethical, and philosophical perspectives on whether—or how—we can know if animals grieve. The episode features three leading thinkers who each offer distinct frameworks for understanding animal responses to death, and reveals how the questions we ask shape what we end up discovering about non-human minds.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Orca Story and Our Impulse to See Grief (01:18 – 03:29)

• Opening Example: In 2018, a killer whale was observed carrying her dead calf for 17 days, covering over 1,000 miles.
• Media Response: Broad coverage framed her actions as grief, with statements such as:

  "The grieving mom just couldn’t let her go. They have grief."

• Other Animal Examples: Dogs lingering at their owner’s grave, elephants touching corpses, donkeys making noise after a companion’s death, birds like geese isolating after losing a mate (03:03).
• Key Question: “Do killer whales feel grief just like humans do? Does any nonhuman animal?” (02:15)

2. The Scientific Skepticism: Can We Really Know What Animals Feel? (04:45 – 10:56)

Jennifer Vonk’s Perspective

• Defining Grief: Vonk points out that even among humans, grief is ambiguous and culturally defined.

  "It's like asking, do people fall in love? ... Different people might define that very differently." (04:45)

• Psychological Definitions: The APA’s definition is human-centric and assumes an abstract understanding of death (04:58).
• Main Challenge: Scientific study relies on observable behavior, which may be misleading. For instance:
  • Allergies can look like crying from grief in people, highlighting the difficulty in inferring inner states from appearances (07:06).

  "You might think I was experiencing grief, when really it’s just an allergic reaction, but on the outside it looks exactly the same." – Jennifer Vonk (07:06)

• Anthropomorphism Warning: Humans interpret animal behaviors through a familiar emotional lens, but this may ignore fundamental differences.

  "What we miss out on are the differences and the fact that they may have a concept that’s so totally different from ours that we’re not able to recognize what it is that they're processing..." (07:48)

• Behavioral Studies: Chimpanzee experiments show that similar behaviors (begging for food) can have different cognitive underpinnings; chimps did not distinguish between a human with their back turned and a human with a blindfold—they behaved similarly in both situations, suggesting their understanding diverges from humans (08:16 – 10:41).

3. The Case for Calling It Grief: Ethics, Empathy, and Science (15:10 – 20:28)

Jessica Pierce’s Perspective

• Empathy and Ethics: Using grief language bridges empathy between humans and other animals.

  "One thing about using the language of grieving and mourning that is valuable is that it allows us to experience empathy for other animals." – Jessica Pierce (15:41)

• Clinical vs. Emotional Language: Objective, clinical observations can strip events of their emotional meaning—ignoring the animal’s actual experience (16:06).

  "The fact is you hurt the animal; the animal experienced pain, fear, suffering." (16:25)

• Parsimony Principle: Evolutionarily, if grief exists in humans, it’s reasonable to expect similar phenomena in other social species.

  "If something evolved in one species, it’s very unlikely that it didn’t also evolve in other species." (17:54)

• Research Opportunity: By cautiously naming animal behaviors as grief, we open up a richer set of questions—about differences between social and solitary animals, the adaptive purpose of grief, and more (18:22).

  "If we assume animals are grieving, it opens up these questions to us." (19:41)

• Adaptive Value of Grief: Raises questions about why behaviors like isolation or neglecting self-care (in both humans and animals) might have evolutionary purpose (19:20).

4. A Third Path: Focus on All Death Behaviors, Not Just Familiar Ones (20:53 – 25:21)

Susanna Monceau’s Perspective

• Beyond Grief: Calls for researchers to interrogate the full spectrum of animal responses to death, not just those that look like human grief.

  "We need to look past grief. Grief is only going to be one specific manifestation of animals' relationship with death." (20:53)

• Unfamiliar Reactions Matter: Points to "weird," non-humanlike behaviors (e.g., storks removing and discarding chicks when resources run low) as especially instructive (21:31).

  "It's a behavior that happens when somehow the mother thinks that there's not enough resources to take care of all her offspring. She will get rid of one of them." – Susanna Monceau (22:23)

• Disturbing and Instructive Stories: Example of dogs eating their dead owner's face, possibly because that’s the “emotional center”—these behaviors might reflect other forms of coping, bonding, or emotional processing beyond grief (23:30).

  "What they eat is the face. And I think this is telling because the face is the emotional center of humans, and it's what we know dogs pay the most attention to." (23:56)

• Value of Unknowability: The most puzzling, non-explainable behaviors can teach the most about animal minds and challenge our frameworks.

  "Those behaviors that are easily explainable are just less interesting because it's easier to see what's happening. And the ones that are super puzzling... that's the one that can really teach us something we don't know." (24:53)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Human-Assumption Bias:

  "If you assume animals are like humans, you miss the ways that they're not like humans. Potentially you limit what you learn about them." – Bird Pinkerton (25:21)

• On Over-Cautious Skepticism:

  "If you're a skeptic, you're going to say, well, we don't have any scientific proof that animals grieve, therefore we can't talk about it. And that ... is really limiting and uninteresting because then you can't even have a conversation and be curious." – Jessica Pierce (17:10)

• On Unfamiliar Animal Behaviors:

  "It's very disturbing to think of a mother who just doesn't care about her infants dying or her babies dying. But I think it's also interesting to try to find out what's going on there." – Susanna Monceau (22:46)

Important Timestamps

• 01:18 – 03:29: Introduction of killer whale case and survey of animal "grief-like" behaviors
• 04:45 – 10:56: Jennifer Vonk explains scientific difficulties in inferring animal emotions and cognition
• 15:10 – 20:28: Jessica Pierce argues for using "grief" to foster empathy and scientific questioning
• 20:53 – 25:21: Susanna Monceau calls for studying all animal responses to death, including the "weird" ones

Closing Synthesis (25:21)

Host Bird Pinkerton summarizes: Whether one is skeptical like Vonk, empathetically assertive like Pierce, or focused on unfamiliar animal reactions like Monceau, the overall lesson is that the very way we frame scientific questions shapes the boundaries of what we can learn about animal minds—and our own.

Further Reading & Credits:

• Jessica Pierce: "Who’s a Good Dog?" and other books on animal ethics
• Susanna Monceau: "Playing Possum" (on animal death understanding)
• Produced by Bird Pinkerton; edited by Brian Resnick and Meredith Hodnot; sound design by Christian Ayala

Summary Takeaway

The question "Do animals grieve?" is itself revealing. How we define grief, the examples we look for, and what behaviors we consider worthy of study all depend on our implicit biases and scientific frameworks. Whether animals actually "grieve" like humans may remain unexplainable—but probing this mystery opens up broader questions about the nature of emotion, consciousness, and the profound differences (and similarities) between species.