Grieving Pet Owners Find Support and Solace

Just before Christmas, a Northern California cat owner saw her pet dragging itself home after it had been shot by a neighbor. The cat died, and an autopsy revealed it also had been severely kicked.

The owner was consumed with outrage and grief, but most of her friends reacted differently than she did, asking, “Why don’t you just get another cat?”

“That’s not what you need to hear at a time like that,” said Bonnie Mader, who runs a crisis hot line for grieving pet owners through the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine.

‘Unique Relationship’

“You need to hear, ‘Oh, that’s very sad,’ and to have someone understand that you’ll never be able to replace that special dog or cat,” Mader said. “You need someone to acknowledge that unique relationship with that animal.”

Grief over pet loss is a very real emotion, agreed Lynette Hart, director of a UC program exploring relationships between humans and animals. But veterinarians until recently did little to assist clients struggling over the deaths of their animals.

For the last 2 1/2 years, Northern California pet owners have had a place to turn--a pet-loss hot line and a free support group run by a trained psychologist and sponsored by the Sacramento Valley Veterinary Medical Assn.

Hart and her husband, Benjamin Hart, a veterinarian who teaches at UC Davis, have specialized in human-animal interactions, and saw the need for developing a way to comfort grieving pet owners.

‘Guilty Feeling’

“There’s that guilty feeling that you allowed this (death) to occur,” Lynette Hart said. “You need to cope with that.”

The Harts, with Davis psychologist Carol Rivero, established the support group and encouraged veterinarians to refer pet owners to it for help.

The group meets for two hours twice a month in Sacramento. Anyone who has experienced a recent pet loss is welcome to attend. The veterinary association pays Rivero’s fees.

“The most important thing is not what I do for the people in the group, but what the people do for each other,” Rivero said. “It is important for them to talk to others with the same experiences.”

‘Not Very Sympathetic’

And, experts said, most people do not know what to say to those grieving over their animals.

“Sometimes people at work are not very sympathetic,” Rivero said. “They say, ‘Why aren’t you over this yet?’ They don’t realize losing an animal can be like the death of a family member.”

Tom Kendall, a Sacramento veterinarian who recommends the group to his clients, agreed.

“We all go through the same feelings of loss, whether it’s a friend or an animal,” he said. “The whole human-animal bond is really important to many people, especially older people.

“The support group lets people know it’s OK to have those feelings, it’s OK to mourn the loss,” Kendall believes. “It’s a friend who has died.”

Encourage Visits

The difficulty for most veterinarians, the Harts said, is that animal doctors generally have not been trained in psychological counseling. But many Sacramento veterinarians give the support-group brochures to patients who have lost animals and encourage them to visit the group.

“I put my own shepherd to sleep about a year before the group started, but I went,” said traveling veterinarian Nancy Weagly, who makes house calls in the Sacramento area.

“It helped,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of clients who have gone (to the group). Everyone comes back with something positive.”

The group’s discussions range from ways to accept the loss to more practical matters such as how to find a pet cemetery, how to dispose of a dead pet or even how to find a minister to officiate at pet services, Rivero said.

Results Worth Effort

While the number of people attending most group sessions is small, the results are worth the effort, the counselors said.

Usually between three and six people come to the sessions, Rivero said. During the holiday season, Mader said, she received three phone calls a week on the hot line.

“We often hear, ‘Oh, you’re so understanding,’ or, ‘I have no one else to talk to,’ ” Mader said. “It’s very rewarding.”