Grief Disorder Tied To Pet Deaths

Heart-shaped memorial stone with roses and small cherub beside orange roses — Photo: Racamani / Shutterstock

New research shows that nearly one in three people have grieved the death of a pet, and for some, that grief meets the clinical bar for a diagnosed disorder.

Story Snapshot

A UK survey of 975 people found 32.6% had lost a pet, and 7.5% of those owners met criteria for prolonged grief disorder.
Only 38.7% of people surveyed in a veterinary best-practices report believe society sees pet loss as valid grief.
Researchers call pet loss “disenfranchised grief” because it often lacks the social support given to human bereavement.
A scoping review found 78 studies on pet grief from 17 countries, showing growing scientific interest since 1977.

What the Numbers Say About Pet Loss

A UK quota sample of 975 people gives one of the clearest pictures yet. Among respondents, 32.6% said they had experienced the death of a pet. Of those pet owners, 7.5% met the clinical criteria for prolonged grief disorder, a recognized mental health diagnosis. Researchers found the relative risk of prolonged grief after losing a pet was 1.27 times higher than for people who had not lost one.

A separate study on bereavement patterns found that when pet deaths are counted, 84.2% of a sample qualified as bereaved. That number dropped to 81.9% when pet loss was left out. Losing a parent remained the most common type of loss overall, but pet death showed up often enough to shift the data meaningfully.

Why Many People Don’t Take Pet Grief Seriously

Researchers use the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe mourning that society doesn’t fully accept as real. This category also includes grief after suicide, miscarriage, and other losses that make people uncomfortable. Pet death often falls into this same group, even when the bond was deep and the loss caused lasting pain.

A report from a veterinary school’s best-practices study found that just 38.7% of people believe society sees pet loss as a valid form of grief. That means most respondents think their communities would not fully understand or support them after losing a pet. Veterinary social workers describe this gap as a key reason grieving pet owners often suffer quietly.

Other researchers describe the same pattern. Pet loss, they write, is often stigmatized, minimized, or dismissed outright, which leaves mourners without the cultural recognition or community support that usually follows a death. This lack of validation can make the grief harder to process, not easier, because the person feels pressure to hide or downplay what they’re feeling.

This mismatch matters because pets occupy a bigger role in households than casual assumptions suggest. One report notes that roughly two-thirds of households across the country include at least one pet as part of the family system. Despite that reality, support systems built for human loss, such as workplace bereavement leave or routine counseling referrals, rarely extend the same recognition to animal companions.

A Growing but Still Developing Field of Study

A scoping review identified 78 studies on pet bereavement published between 1977 and 2022, drawn from 17 countries. Most of that research came from North American authors, and output peaked around 2016. The growing volume shows researchers increasingly treat pet loss as a subject worth serious study, even though the field remains younger and smaller than research on human bereavement.

What makes pet loss different, according to one veterinary hospital’s published guidance, is that society still doesn’t treat it as equal to losing a human family member. That gap shapes how much social support a grieving owner can expect to receive from friends, employers, or even healthcare providers after the fact.

Where Institutional Recognition Still Falls Short

The data suggests a real and measurable gap between how deeply some people grieve pets and how little formal recognition that grief receives. Prolonged grief disorder rates near 7.5% are not trivial, yet workplace policies, insurance coverage, and school support systems rarely account for animal loss the way they do for a parent, spouse, or child. Veterinary social workers remain one of the few professional groups actively addressing this gap through counseling and decision support, but their reach is limited compared with the scale of pet ownership nationwide.

None of this means every person who loses a pet needs clinical treatment. But the research shows enough owners experience real, measurable distress that dismissing their grief outright runs counter to what the data actually shows.