Is animal grief real?

Summary

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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)

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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.

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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)

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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).

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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).

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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)

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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)

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

Transcript

[Bird Pinkerton]

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[Narrator/Host]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

In 2018, media outlets started covering the story of a killer whale. This week there's been a lot of whale news. This killer whale had had a baby, a calf. Then soon after the birth, that calf died and the killer whale started to do something unusual.

[Narrator/Host]

For 17 days she's been carrying her.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Dead calf on her back for hundreds of kilometers, a thousand miles.

[Susanna Monceau]

They say.

[Narrator/Host]

The orca is laboring through the water as she carries the calf, either by one fin or pushing it through the.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Water on her head. News anchors, politicians, lots of people commented on this situation and many of them had a specific word for the behavior of this whale. They called it grief.

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We saw a mother's grief.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Jennifer Vonk]

They feel grief, these mothers, just like humans do.

[Bird Pinkerton]

They're huge mammals. But do killer whales feel grief just like humans do? Does any non human animal? On the one hand, there are lots of compelling examples that suggest that the answer could be yes. Examples of animal species doing grief like things.

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The man died earlier this month in a small village.

[Narrator/Host]

His dog was later found right here.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

At his grave site, refusing to leave even seven days without food.

[Bird Pinkerton]

If you go on YouTube, Facebook, various news outlets, you can find videos like this.

[Narrator/Host]

Local villagers now plan on building a kennel for the dog next to its master's grave.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Videos of dogs, but also videos of elephants visiting a corpse. And so you can see that these.

[Narrator/Host]

Elephants are kind of holding their trunks out and smelling the body.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Donkeys gathering Around a dead herd member and making lots of noise. It's not just mammals, it's also birds, such as the case of Blossom the goose. Sometimes when geese lose a mate, they lose weight. They isolate themselves.

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After Bud died, Blossom's grief was as.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Evident as any human's. And when I watch some of these videos, like I get it, I get why it seems like animals grieve. But for a lot of researchers, seems like is not really good enough. This is unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton and today on the show, researchers give me the case for and against saying that some animals experience, experience grief. It's a weirdly trickier problem than you might imagine. And their answers help us understand what it takes to really get inside another creature's head. To start, if it looks like a grief and it quacks like a grief, why not call it a grief, right? Like what is the problem here? I reached out to a researcher named Jennifer Vonk who studies how animals think, including how they think about death. And she says that the first issue here is that grief itself is not super well defined.

[Jennifer Vonk]

I mean, sometimes we try to study something in non humans and realize that we don't even have a good handle on it in humans. And I think it is, it's like asking, do people fall in love? You know, different people might define that very differently.

[Bird Pinkerton]

There are definitions out there like that the American Psychological association defines grief as the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person. But with that word person, like that definition kind of assumes that you're dealing not just with a human, but with a human understanding of death.

[Jennifer Vonk]

I think that grief, and this is just my definition, I guess it would entail an understanding of the finality of that loss. Like the person is gone, it's not fixable, they're never coming back, it's permanent. And like understanding death in that kind of abstract way, we don't have evidence that animals have those kind of concepts.

[Bird Pinkerton]

It's not that she's some kind of like cold hearted monster who thinks that animals are emotionless machines, right? Like she, she very much gets the impulse to sort of attribute emotions to animals. And at home with her pet cats, she's doing it all the time.

[Jennifer Vonk]

My husband and I are always talking about like, oh so and so's jealous, like look how jealous he is because I'm sitting with the other cat. Or I mean their little expressions look like they're angry or sulking or jealous or like we interpret in that way for sure.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But Jennifer says That when it comes to writing down like this animal is experiencing jealousy or anger or grief in a scientific context, she's a lot more cautious and she needs a lot more evidence.

[Jennifer Vonk]

I think it's a very difficult question to answer because it requires having this sort of access to their subjective experience, which I, you know, as scientists, as much as we would like to have, that everything is kind of an inference based on their external behavior. So, I mean, I think we do. Sorry, my eyes are running from allergies in this moment.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Jennifer dabbed at her eyes and nose with a tissue. And if she hadn't been laughing and cracking jokes, I might have thought she was pretty upset. And as she pointed out, like, this is kind of the problem here.

[Jennifer Vonk]

See, if you were looking at me, you might think I was experiencing grief, when really it's just an allergic reaction, but on the outside it looks exactly the same.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Now, if I'm at a human funeral for someone's relative, say, and they are crying into a handkerchief, it's not a huge leap for me to assume like that person is probably grieving, right? They're probably not just experiencing allergies. That's because I'm fairly fluent in the language of human emotional reactions and, and can be pretty confident in what they really mean. But Jennifer says that animals could have an entire emotional language that means something really different from our own.

[Jennifer Vonk]

We don't know what it's like to conceive of the world as a killer whale or as a cat or a non human primate or any individual that doesn't have language really. So in order for us to understand it, we look for similarities. But I think 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 or how they're representing things.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Jennifer says this isn't just sort of theoretical. Right. There are real examples of how relying on similarities can be deceiving when you're studying animals. So to take a quick step away from grief, she told me about some studies that were done on chimpanzees. And these studies were trying to figure out if chimps understand when they're being looked at like that someone else can see them. So in these studies, they sort of had chimps interact with researchers and specifically to sort of get a treat from the researchers, the chimps had to hold their hands in a cup position to kind of beg.

[Jennifer Vonk]

So it only makes sense to do that if somebody's looking at you and.

[Bird Pinkerton]

They can see you because they have to see you to know, to give you a treat. And so the researchers ran these tests and at first the chimps reacted in a pretty human like way. Like, if the researchers were facing the chimps, they did beg. And if a researcher's back was turned, the chimps did not beg.

[Jennifer Vonk]

They were doing what they should be doing. If they understood that another person could.

[Bird Pinkerton]

See them and the researchers could have just left it there, like, they could have said, all right, this behavior looks kind of like human behavior, we can just assume it's the same and move on. Instead, they did further tests. Like, for example, the researchers would face the chimp with a blindfold over their eyes. And in that situation they found that even when someone had a blindfold over their eyes and clearly could not see see, the chimps would still beg.

[Jennifer Vonk]

And then you could really see that the chimps weren't really following the cues that we would. If you know that someone can only see you by having their eyes focused on you.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Because if most humans saw a person with a blindfold over their eyes, like we would think, oh, they can't see me begging or not begging, I don't need to beg. And the chimps didn't sort of immediately make that leap. So yes, like, chimps might seem to interact with the world in really similar ways to humans sometimes. But Jennifer says that if you poke around and sort of run careful studies like this, you might find something slightly different is going on in their brains, that they're processing the world in a slightly different way.

[Jennifer Vonk]

I think it is important to be open to the fact that even very different behaviors could mean the same underlying feeling, but also very similar looking behaviors could arise because of a very different underlying process.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Basically, you have to test and sort of probe for differences that reveal things about different species, unique approaches to the world. Which is why coming back to animals and death, When Jennifer is confronted with something like this story of a killer whale carrying a calf, she's skeptical about calling it grief. Her argument is essentially that if we just sort of layer human interpretations onto animals, if we anthropomorphize them, we risk assuming that we already understand what's going on. And if we do that, we could actually miss something fundamental about how animals think on their own terms or miss the emotional equivalent of kind of a chimp actually having a very different way of thinking about eyes. There are a lot of researchers out there who agree that applying the term grief to non human animals could lead us astray but there are also researchers who do not. So after the break, the case for saying that animals do grieve, and the case for asking an entirely different question.

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[Bird Pinkerton]

Good grief. So do animals Grieve? Before the break, we heard Jennifer Vonk make the case that we just don't know enough yet to make a determination here. But Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist who's written several books on animals and death, disagrees with Jennifer Vonk's views somewhat. She thinks that we can say that some non human animals grieve and even that we should say that.

[Narrator/Host]

I think one thing about using the language of grieving and mourning that is valuable is that it allows us to experience empathy for other animals.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Jessica laid out a scenario for me. Basically she said, imagine a dog on a table being given electric shocks. A researcher might be taking measurements and make notes about this dog.

[Narrator/Host]

Like the dog's body seized and the muscles contracted and levels of the hormone cortisol spiked.

[Bird Pinkerton]

These are all super clinical observations. They're very safe, they're objective. But they miss the most important thing here.

[Narrator/Host]

The fact is you hurt the animal, the animal experienced pain, fear, suffering.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And Jessica argues that emotional pain is kind of the same thing. Like if we see an animal expressing emotional pain, we should call it like we see it. Like if a dog seems to be grieving its owner's passing, spending time on his grave, let's not beat around some objective bush. Let's just call that grief. I actually took this back to Jennifer Vonk, who said that sort of physical pain is a little bit easier to diagnose and read than something as complex as emotional pain and especially grief. But our bioethicist, Jessica, she has a larger point to make here.

[Narrator/Host]

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 to me, that's really limiting and uninteresting because then you can't even have a conversation and be curious.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Basically, she says that if we are so super duper cautious about anthropomorphizing animals and sort of avoiding using words like grief. We end up slamming shut a bunch of doors to further research. We limit what we can potentially learn about animal grief and what we can learn from animals about our own grief.

[Narrator/Host]

There's a principle in science of parsimony. If something evolved in one species, species, it's very unlikely that, you know, it didn't also evolve in other species. And I think to say animals don't grieve, like, how could it be that those capacities evolved only one time in only one species?

[Bird Pinkerton]

If we allow ourselves to assume that things that look like grief in other animals are grief, Jessica says that that lets us ask questions like what does grief look like in different animals? Are social animals animals that live in groups, are they more prone to grief than non social animals?

[Narrator/Host]

I don't think we have enough evidence yet to say one way or the other, but I think that's a really interesting question.

[Bird Pinkerton]

We could even ask what is the point of grief?

[Narrator/Host]

Is it adaptive? Because animals are, in a sense, they're wasting time when they're grieving.

[Bird Pinkerton]

When humans grieve, we sometimes don't eat, we sometimes isolate or lie around. And in some ways these are not particularly useful things to do.

[Narrator/Host]

You're spending time not mating, not foraging, not protecting territory, not doing the things that you need to do for survival.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So similarly, like when a goose isolates and doesn't pick a new mate, or when a killer whale carries around a decomposing calf body, potentially exposing herself to.

[Narrator/Host]

Pathogens, what is the adaptive value of that death related behavior? What's the adaptive value of magpies covering a dead body in grass?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Is there something community building about grief? Is it necessary if you want to be a social animal? Could we study different versions of animal grief and find similarities or differences that could teach us about ourselves? Jessica says that if we assume animals are grieving, it opens up these questions to us.

[Narrator/Host]

These are, I think, fascinating questions that we can't answer yet. And I mean, I think they tell us a lot about who animals are and how animals think and what animals feel, all of which have ethical relevance and can tell us about ourselves too.

[Bird Pinkerton]

These are two potential ways to think about the stories of animals that seem to grieve, right? Like we could say we don't know enough to say that these animals are grieving, or we could say we should assume these animals are grieving and then explore further questions about that grief. But what if we're actually just way too fixated on this whole grief question in the first place.

[Susanna Monceau]

If we're interested in the broader question of how do animals relate to death and how do animals understand death, how do animals experience death, Then we need to look past grief. Grief is only going to be one specific manifestation of animals relationship with death.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Susanna Monceau is an animal ethicist and a philosopher who has written about animal reactions to death. And while she does think that it's possible that perhaps some animals do grieve.

[Susanna Monceau]

It'S the other weird, weirder stuff that we can't easily fit into these narratives that I find much more fascinating.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Susanna wants researchers to be a little less focused on stories of animal death that look familiar. Stories about killer whales and their calves or dogs on their master's grave. And instead she wants a little more focus on the ways that animals react to death that are wildly different from humans. So take storks, for example. There's this video of a stork on YouTube where you see the stork with several stork babies in a big flat nest. And the stork parent kind of pokes at its chick with a long orange beak and then grabs one by the neck. The baby kind of wriggles in protest, and the parent drags the baby away from its siblings, pulls it over to the side of the nest and drops it onto the roof below.

[Susanna Monceau]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

This is hopefully not the kind of thing that we see humans doing in examples like this. And there are a lot of them. The animals are approaching loss and death differently.

[Susanna Monceau]

We just don't really know what to do with it. Like, it's just very confusing. 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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Susanna wants researchers to study these things because they're so odd and unfamiliar. And she says that actually, if we studied these kinds of very weird, very unhuman reactions to death and loss more closely, we might even circle back into conversations about grief again, just in a really different way. Like, she told me about this, this famous case from Germany where a man died, his. His neighbors found him less than an hour later, and in the meantime his.

[Susanna Monceau]

Dog ate him or ate his face rather.

[Bird Pinkerton]

This is actually a weirdly common phenomenon. And Susannah says you could potentially make a case that this behavior from dogs does demonstrate something like grief, or at least an expression of the loss of an important companion. Because if you look at what specifically a lot of these dogs are eating.

[Susanna Monceau]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

She says that wild, undomesticated dogs, they will go for a corpse's torso because.

[Susanna Monceau]

That'S where you have all the organs that are nutrient rich.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So when a pet dog goes for the face, Susannah speculates that maybe, who knows, this is actually the dog's way of emotionally, like, working through losing a caretaker. Like, maybe this behavior is grief or grief adjacent, even though it might not look like a common human way to express grief. Or maybe it's not. But it's examples like this that make Susanna want to push researchers away from sort of hyper focusing on the actions that look familiar to us.

[Susanna Monceau]

I am interested in what is unknown, right? Like, 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, like, why is this dog eating his owner's face if in theory he loves him? You know, that's like the one that can really teach us something we don't know.

[Bird Pinkerton]

I actually find all three of these researchers cases pretty compelling in some ways. They're really all just talking about how sort of asking or framing a question limits the answers you can get. Right? Like in Jennifer Vonk's more skeptical argument. She says, 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. But in Jessica Pierce's Pushback, she's saying that if you're too cautious about kind of drawing connections between animals and humans, you limit the questions you can ask about animal human relationships. And then for Susanna Monzo, if you're only looking for a very human like, version of grief, you're missing out on a whole bunch of animal weirdness when it comes to death. And ultimately, you know, these three thinkers actually have a fair amount of overlap and even overlapping research interests. But I think it's maybe useful for all three of them to disagree a little here or to have different approaches to animals, because maybe the only way to get at some kind of an answer to the question of, like, what is happening inside animal heads is to have lots of researchers setting different limits for themselves and asking very different kinds of questions. Thanks so much to all three researchers who for their time. Jessica Pierce has a number of books on animals and ethics out, including one called who's a Good Dog? And Susanna Munso has a book on how animals understand death called Playing Possum. This episode was produced and reported by Me Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Brian Resnick and Meredith Hodnot, who also manages our team. We had sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld. Tan Nguyen checked our fax and Manning Nguyen is a great person to go to New Jersey with. If you enjoyed the show, I'd really, really love it if you could leave us a review. I'd also love to hear your thoughts directly. You can email us@ unexplainable vox.com and I read every email. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we will be back.

[Narrator/Host]

On.

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