Do cats experience grief? New research suggests they might

If a human or another animal close to them dies, does a cat grieve the loss?

That was the question a team of researchers from Oakland University in Michigan set out to answer when they surveyed hundreds of cat owners about their cat’s behavior after another cat or dog in the household passed away.

The data showed that cats exhibited behaviors associated with grief — such as eating and playing less — more often after the death of a fellow pet, suggesting they may in fact have been in mourning.

“It made me a little more optimistic that they are forming attachments with each other,” said Jennifer Vonk, a professor of psychology at Oakland University, who co-authored the study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

“It’s not that I want the cats to be sad,” Vonk went on, “[but] there is a part of us, I think, as humans that wants to think that if something happens to us our pets would miss us.”

Though animals from elephants to horses to dogs have been shown to express signs of grief, less is known about the emotional life of the domesticated house cat. Vonk said she knew of only one other study on grief in domestic cats.

For their research, Vonk and her coauthor, Brittany Greene, surveyed 412 cat caregivers about how their feline companion acted after another pet in the house died.

They found that, after the death of a fellow pet, cats on average sought more attention from their owners, spent more time alone, appeared to look for the deceased animal, ate less and slept more.

Vonk said they didn’t observe “huge changes,” but the behavior changes they did see mirrored those that had previously been observed in dogs, which have evolved in a more social way than cats.

“For me, the most compelling finding is that when cats were reported to change their behavior in ways that would be consistent with what we would expect for grief,” Vonk said, “it’s predicted by things like the length of time that the animals lived together or the amount of time that they had spent together engaged in various activities or the quality of their relationships.”

Vonk acknowledged that there are some caveats to the research. An owner may have been projecting their own feelings of sadness on their surviving cat when reporting their symptoms, or the cat may have been trying to console the grief-stricken human. (Cat owners who felt more grief themselves reported more grief in their surviving cats, researchers found.)

The cat subjects may also have been behaving differently in response to a new household dynamic with one fewer pet, she added.

The researchers said more studies in this area would be necessary before drawing any conclusions. But Vonk, a cat owner herself, said her and Greene’s data suggest that cats may experience emotions akin to grief and sadness in ways that weren’t previously known.

“It does make me think maybe it’s more likely than I thought before that cats do have those feelings,” she said.