Counselors Help Those Grieving Over Loss of Pets

A sunny library with no distractions for the professional listener, three women with private hurts . . . then the talk, anger, tears, confusion and resentment that is spilled at all group counseling.

Except that this grief was for dead pets.

“I lost a 17-year-old cat. I had him put to sleep on Monday night, and what I want from this group is twofold,” explained Chip Holland, 36. During the week, Holland counsels convicts at the Department of Correction’s Northern Reception Center at Vacaville. This Saturday, she was an adviser in search of guidance.

Looking for Feedback

“One: I’m looking for some kind of feedback for my own rationalization that I did the right thing by having Beefer put down. Two: I hope to find some way to deal with the pain, the loss itself.”

Holland had come to the Marin Humane Society here (25 miles north of San Francisco) with a roommate. Cindy MacDonald said that Beefer’s end, despite the obvious discomfort of his terminal disease, had been a tough test of her own unselfishness. Curious: Because MacDonald, 27, is an animal care technician at the center where death of beloved pets, from disease, injury and euthanasia, is her daily routine.

The listener, a pet bereavement counselor, caught the subtlety. Maurine Sauters--31 years a registered nurse and a lay Episcopal minister--asked more about MacDonald’s work. A new concern emerged. MacDonald spoke of how dead pets were placed in the center’s crematorium.

Heavy dogs and big deer were tossed into the oven by two workers. Rudely. By necessity. MacDonald prefered to lay smaller animals down. Gently. With dignity. But Beefer’s disposal had been left for another worker. . . .

“There was a part of me that wanted to say to my boss: ‘Don’t throw him in there . . . lay him in,’ ” MacDonald told Sauters. “Now there’s a part of me that wants to ask how he (Beefer) was put in. Another part says: ‘What does it matter?’ ”

Whatever the method, MacDonald said, she would not blame her boss or the center. “But knowing might resolve the conflict in me.”

The third woman said little. She was red-faced. Stoical.

“You seem to be hurting,” Sauters suggested.

“No, I’m not,” the woman said.

She declined to identify herself. She said she did not want to discuss her concerns with the media. But she would like to make a statement.

She had owned two cats. One died from feline leukemia. She agreed to an inoculation to protect Waldo, the survivor. “He died from the vet’s shot,” she said, “and you can quote me.”

Then she asked a reporter and a photographer to leave the room while she spoke her grief to Sauters.

“I’m uncomfortable with the word therapy to describe counseling for pet loss,” Sauters, of Daly City, said. “It’s facilitating; it is establishing interaction. The idea is to get it out. It doesn’t matter where it goes as long as it gets out and doesn’t fester inside.

“The bottom line is letting people understand that grieving for a pet is perfectly normal.”

Said Claire Greene of North Hollywood, a psychologist who recently added pet loss to her portfolio of marriage, family, child and geriatric counseling: “It’s a form of confession.”

What does that make the confessors?

“I prefer to call them clients,” added counselor Valerie Inverso of Hermosa Beach. “These are people simply having a crisis of the moment.”

Then that aligns the work with crisis intervention?

“Absolutely,” said psychologist Lynette Hart of UC Davis. “It (pet grief counseling) is short term and targeted to help a person for two, three or four times (sessions) but not much longer than that.”

Despite the general mildness of emotional disturbance stemming from the death of an animal, claimed Hart and other experts, pet bereavement counseling certainly is no cause for snickers.

“We are dealing with animal-related loss trauma, and that’s as real as any life trauma,” Oakland veterinarian James Harris said. He is chairman of the Human-Animal Bond Committee of the California Veterinary Medical Assn. “It doesn’t matter the why of the loss, just that there is a loss and grief at that loss.

Valuable Contribution

“It (pet loss counseling) is a valuable contribution to the quality of life . . . and a social service implicit to the practice of veterinary medicine.

“A good pediatrician addresses the anxiety of the mother as carefully as he considers the condition of the child. So must veterinary medicine not be confined to treating animals, so must a veterinarian not ignore the person at the end of the leash.”

In the last three years, that realization has broadened. So has the practice of pet-loss counseling. It has expanded from one counselor at the University of Pennsylvania to dozens of specialists, courses and facilities in California, New York, Ohio, Texas and Minnesota.

--At the veterinary medical group’s annual convention in Monterey recently, several presentations, including one from the British-born Harris, centered on pet loss.

--Lynette Hart is a psychologist and acting director of the Human-Animal Relations Center at UC Davis. Her husband, veterinarian Ben Hart, teaches pet loss and grief counseling at the California School of Veterinary Medicine at the same university. They recently organized a Sacramento area program of individual and group counseling for pet-loss sufferers.

--Jamie Quackenbush of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, and long considered the pioneer of pet-loss counseling, has written a book on the subject. “When Your Pet Dies” will be published by Simon & Shuster this month.

--Monthly and sometimes weekly group pet bereavement sessions are currently being offered by the Marin Humane Society at Ignacio, Pets Unlimited of San Francisco, the Animal Medical Center of New York, the Peninsula Humane Society of San Mateo and the San Francisco SPCA.

--Veterinarian Kathleen Carson of the Palos Verdes Family Pet Clinic, Redondo Beach, and Greene, a counselor with Southern California Health Care in North Hollywood, are planning pet-loss groups for the Los Angeles area.

Greene--the mother of two veterinarian sons with veterinarian wives--began individual pet bereavement counseling four years ago. She has handled about 40 cases. The maximum fee for an hourly session, based on a sliding scale, has been $35.

She agreed that, if left alone, those grieving for lost pets would likely recover without professional assistance. “A therapist once said that if you do nothing about depression it will go away in five years,” she explained. “The question is, why wait five years?”

Or, asks Carson, why wait until a pet dies? She is a firm believer in reminding pet owners, children and adults, of the relatively short life spans of animals. That knowledge, Carson says, will lessen the crisis of pet death and the anticipation that “in some ways be worse than getting over the actual death.”

In August, at Hillhaven Convalescent Hospital in Orange, a mutt called Muttly helped a patient with Alzheimer’s disease. “I used to have a dog,” the man said after Muttly had wriggled his head into the patient’s lap. The words broke a nine-month silence.

Mandy, a shepherd mix, has brought companionship to the rehabilitation unit at Huntington Memorial Hospital.

Animals have been prescribed to reduce stress among heart patients, the loneliness of shut-ins, hostility in mental institutions, tensions in prison . . . even the despair of the terminally ill.

Such is the power and strength of the human-animal bond.

Such is the potential for heartbreak, says the American Medical Veterinary Assn., when there are about 180 million people in the United States who live with at least one pet. And a total of 70 million cats and dogs.

“I’ve seen overt self-destruction among my clients,” said Harris, who operates the Montclair Veterinary Clinic at Oakland. “I’ve had clients actually hurt themselves, their heads and hands, by beating on the walls of my waiting room.

“Suicides following the death of a pet are well documented. Often the request to euthanase a healthy companion animal is often an overture to (the owner’s) suicide in the parking lot. I personally do not perform convenience euthanasia.”

Common to the pet-loss expert are clients who relate the intensity of their grief to the death of a child or parent. One pet-loss counselor reported a woman in simultaneous attendance at three group sessions in two cities--and for five weeks. Another veterinarian spoke of a client who suffered periods of dysfunction--three years after her pet died.

Granted, they say, these are extremes.

“Of my caseload,” Claire Greene said, “about 75% fall into the category of just needed a helping hand and a shoulder to cry on. But, for 25%, the death of a pet represents the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Previous straws, say specialists, might include a divorce, job loss, death of a parent or a highway accident. Then comes the death of a pet, ergo another broken relationship, grief descends to depression and an individual’s problems seem insurmountable. Then, say the counselors, there should be referral to higher counseling.

“In essence, animals become family,” Harris continued. “People will make private relationships with animals as spousal substitutes, surrogate lovers and child substitutes. The pet then becomes a non-judgmental family member that gives total love and devotion and never questions the state of the individual involved.

“And they never want to borrow the car keys and they don’t want money and they never bitch about what you cook for dinner. So, to the geriatric single, the institutionalized both penal and geriatric, the resident of a hospice . . . pets create some semblance of sanity, health, happiness and reliability. And when that goes there can be devastation.”

Rick Johnson, community services director for the Marin Humane Society, has an audio-tape on pet loss. It was made by a veterinarian in Dallas, and Johnson offers it to clients “to take home and play it in private.”

And that, he said, points to another crucial issue of pet loss: “People are accustomed to the fact that grief can be public for a dead person, but not for a dead pet. So rather than embarrass themselves in front of others, people bury their grief.”

Then there are well-meaning friends, employers, even spouses who attempt to minimize the death of a pet (“c’mon, it was just an animal”) or suggest the quick fix (“we’ll go down to the animal shelter tomorrow”) of an immediate replacement.

“Either is a denial of hurt and loss, and a devaluation of that human being,” Greene said. “Yet, for that person, the hurt is real. How can anyone dismiss it so casually?

“And until one recovers from the hurt, one shouldn’t attempt to establish another long-term relationship with another pet. As long as grief remains unexpressed, recovery remains delayed.”

Jamie Quackenbush, 37, currently completing his doctorate in social work, estimates that he has counseled “2,000 or better” since he entered the pet loss field in 1980. Less than 15% could be considered “severe . . . suicidal, depressed, dysfunctional.” Of the others, “two to four weeks is the usual recovery time when a person is back on top and able to talk about it without crumbling.

“When we start pushing four weeks and they (clients) still sound the way they did when the animal died, then my clinical hunch is that there probably is something else going on and this (pet loss) was just a catalyst.

“That’s when they might become a psychiatric referral.”

Of cases successfully concluded, Quackenbush vividly recalls counseling a woman who had lost her fiance in Vietnam. Then she had been raped. Shortly afterward, she had adopted a cat, had started a nursing career and her life had stabilized.

Then Effie, the cat, died. The nurse came to see Quackenbush.

“Unfortunately, the cat had become associated with her recovery from the earlier traumas,” he said. “She seemed to think that without the cat there would have been no recovery.

“I didn’t question the significance of the cat in her life, but it was easy to see that the cat was only a symbol of her recovery, a coincidence, and that in actual fact she had done it all (recovery) for herself.”

Once convinced, said Quackenbush, grief and case closed.

The 90-minute session, said Sauters, had gone well.

She had concentrated on leading questions; tough enough to put clients in touch with their emotions, soft enough to prevent forced feelings. She had made no challenges, posed no question that invited a yes-no answer. The idea was for clients and not the counselor to set the tone.

Sauters also had made light suggestions. That grieving for a pet can produce echoes of earlier sadness for a dead relative. That a grave or a forest where ashes are scattered might be important as “a physical place . . . a focus for closure” of grief.

Chip Holland said the meeting worked for her. She didn’t think she would need further counseling: “I think this is probably the first time I’ve been able to talk about Beefer with only a lump in my throat.”

Cindy MacDonald was impressed: “Strange, I probably never would have said anything about my concerns had I not come here. So in that respect I’m glad I said it, I’m glad I got it out . . . because animals are good people.”

The third woman did not write her name on the sign-in sheet. Not even a first name. But she did take a business card from Sauters. “I hope she calls,” Sauters said.