Grieving for our Pets

by Michael Schaffer

NOVEMBER 29, 2007 TAGS: ANIMALS, GRIEF, COPING, LOVE ADD A COMMENT

In 2006, Marlena Schmid adopted a Shiba Inu from an animal refuge in Monmouth County, in northern New Jersey. She called her Foxy. From the start, Foxy was a difficult dog. Sweet around the house, she was aggressive around others, barking and snarling and lunging and, on at least one occasion, biting a neighbor who was walking towards her hedges carrying a pair of gardening clippers.

Schmid tried to help. She took the dog to an obedience class at her local PetSmart and eventually started working with a team of behaviorists at the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary hospital, two hours away.

But whatever demons controlled Foxy’s behavior were not appeased. On Labor Day, Schmid accidentally left the garage door open. Foxy got out. Wandering the streets unleashed, she came upon a woman who was walking another dog. Snarling and barking ensued. The other dog, petrified, wrapped its leash around its owner’s legs. Foxy lunged and bit the woman, tearing a chunk of flesh from her leg. Police were called. An ambulance carted the victim off to the hospital. And Schmid, consulting with the team back at Penn, started tiptoeing towards the most difficult decision of her life.

“It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish holidays,” she remembers. “And there were all these children at home, running around the neighborhood. I was thinking about it. It’s a terrible thing when an animal bites, but I don’t know if I could have lived with myself if she had maimed a child.”

Two weeks later, Schmid drove her dog back to Philadelphia. After taking Foxy on a final walk through the tree-lined neighborhood abutting the hospital, she had the 4-year-old put to sleep. Foxy’s ashes were sent back to Schmid’s house by FedEx.

“She trusted me when I brought her here,” Schmid said, breaking down as she finished telling her story. “And I left without her.” A month later, she still hadn’t been able to open the box.

If the sad tale of the aggressive dog put down is an old one, what came next is a little less classic. On a fall night two weeks after Foxy’s demise, Schmid wound her solitary way back to the veterinary hospital. In a bleak cinderblock examination room, unexceptional except for the box of Kleenex atop the x-ray viewing box, she sat in a circle full of other broken-hearted pet owners and unfurled her story, her grief, and her guilt. Penn’s pet loss support group had a new member.

To say the stories aired at biweekly gatherings are sad is like calling the end of Old Yeller a bit of a letdown. One woman’s cat had succumbed to tainted pet food. Another’s died in a car crash that nearly killed its owner. One visitor said she had been coming, on and off, since her cat died of cancer in 2003. Yet another told of how her daughter’s pit bull had mauled her tiny Schipperke. The dog lingered for four weeks before dying of complications of her treatment.

The mourners passed pictures of the dogs, in good health and ill. They spoke of guilt and rage, and listened as a facilitator tried to soothe those feelings. By session’s end, the box of tissues was well on its way to being exhausted.

The extent of the grief -- and the nature of the mourning -- speaks to a little-noticed transformation in American culture. Just as yesterday’s supermarket kibble has become today’s organic pet formula and yesterday’s neighborhood vet has morphed into today’s high-tech veterinary hospital, so too have Americans seen a revolution in the way they mourn pets. Gone are the roadside eccentrics of Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris’ 1982 documentary about pet cemeteries. Contemporary mourners can remember their pets with specially designed Hallmark cards, etched glass gravestones, or gemstones made from the deceased’s ashes. A Texas firm will bank a pet’s DNA lest anyone ever market cloning technology. And, of course, the grieving can talk out their sorrow with a professional.

But if the new American way of pet death represents a broader change in our long love affair with that doggie in the window, the bereavement group also reflects the limits of that change.

Christina Bach, the group’s facilitator, used to counsel the families of patients in a nearby hospital’s oncology wing before she became one of the country’s few full-time veterinary social workers. Though pet owners like her may have embraced a new relationship with their animals, the society around them doesn’t always get it.

When someone’s spouse or child or parent dies, coworkers might organize a collection or buy flowers; office policy would likely provide a few days off. Not so for pets. One after the other, the mourners on hand at Bach’s group spoke of how the loneliness and absurdity of the situation -- everyone has some version of being told that it’s only a pet! -- compounded the sense of loss. Not to mention the fact that pet owners, unlike human spouses or parents, are often involved in the final decision to end their animal’s life.

“Pet loss is so disenfranchised in terms of forms of grief,” Bach says. “It’s not as important as when your spouse dies, in society’s eyes. But maybe it’s more important in your own eyes. People will just say, ‘oh, get over it.’ This is a place where they can grieve.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the number of meetings like Bach’s has grown rapidly in the two decades since Penn’s group first gathered. Today, the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement lists support-group meetings in 25 different states. Bach says counselors like her are looking into starting a professional organization as well.

The market, at any rate, looks likely to keep growing. One estimate of the pet population suggests it has tripled over the past four decades. Products marketers say that, for empty-nesters and childless couples and single folks like Schmid, pets represent ersatz children, the recipients of an entire household’s nurturing instincts. In the sprawling pet industry -- whose total receipts this year are projected at $41 billion, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers’ Association -- they call this trend “humanization.” Some 81 percent (up from 55 percent in 1995) of owners have told American Demographics that they consider themselves their animal’s “mommy” or “daddy.” From pricey toys to plush beds, an endless array of products caters to those same quasi-parental feelings.

But the one major difference, of course, is that few people expect to outlive their kids. And so, while pet cemeteries date back a century, today’s mourning has a somewhat different feel, Bach says: “For so many people that choose not to have children, like myself, the pets are it. The literature says the most difficult thing to go through is losing a child. This is a parallel.”