Our family dog, Pretzel, died in early April this year. Pretzel was a long-haired, orange-brown dachshund with distinguished graying around his muzzle; he died after a slow decline from kidney failure, at 15 years old. He had a great spirit, was extraordinarily loving, and could even smile, along with possessing a few less than praiseworthy traits, like not always coming when called. There were times when we suspected that he was not a mere canine, as he took inordinate pleasure in mutual gazing, holding eye-contact for long moments. In this newsletter, I want to reflect on mourning for an animal companion, and this will naturally veer toward speculation about humans’ relationships with animals.
Pretzel and my daughter had a wedding when she was 10 years old, richly documented with photos.
While Pretzel loved everyone in the family, his love for my wife was the greatest. Talk about maternal transference! Pretzel and I grew closer, though, after the death of our other dog, Sonia, a sheltie, whom my daughter and I had trained and to whom I was devoted.
Pretzel seemed to know when I was sad and responded in a way that was comforting. During the months when Pretzel was going downhill, my son would sing to him every night before going to bed—pop songs about love and surprising us with lovely Hebrew melodies that Pretzel seemed to relish.
What else can I tell you about Pretzel’s personality? He came to us, a bit traumatized, as we purchased him on a lark from a pet store, not a breeder. After we had played with him there, he looked back longingly at us, and the rest was history. Pretzel had arrived in New York from Nebraska by truck, which led me to I try to imagine what that journey was like for him, rattling around in a dark cage. At the risk of sounding brutal, isn’t it strange that we fancy ourselves as beloved by dogs, even though the truth is more disturbing? Typically, we take them from their dog family, severing their attachment systems and grafting them on to us. Our relation to dogs is complicated and evokes negative feelings of guilt, narcissism, and aggression that can be painful to identify and own as well as more comfortable, positive feelings.
It has been interesting to observe our divergent mourning processes in the family. Both my wife and son have been emotional and expressive about the loss, crying easily and intensely. My daughter, who is now a young adult, is not living at home and has seemed less affected. I have been slower to feel the loss, although I find myself privatively looking over at his empty bed, half-expecting to see him raise his head and greet me in the morning with hopeful and excited tail-wagging.
A week ago, we finally held a ceremony in Pretzel’s honor that we had been planning for some time: we painted rocks with individual messages, went down to Riverside Park, which he loved, read a few of Mary Oliver’s simple, joyous poems about dogs, and placed the rocks in the cracks of the stone wall.[i] Somehow that has helped to unlock emotion within me, and I have been thinking about Pretzel more frequently and tearfully. My plan to write this month’s newsletter on another topic can wait.
My eyes have been drawn to reading about mourning pets. Some pieces have had a strong effect, like Margaret Renkl’s moving reflection on the premature death of Rascal, her dog who had a catastrophic accident. Her words about the aftermath spoke to me: “an inescapable absence that spreads into every crevice and corner of our house. A great yawning hole in the place where a mischievous, laughing little dog so recently lived” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/opinion/grief-pets-dogs.html?searchResultPosition=1).
Diana Hembree, a co-founding editor of Mindsite, tells us about the loss of her 8-year-old poodle-terrier, named Jefferson (https://mindsitenews.org/newsletter/mourning-the-loss-of-a-pet/). Like Renkl and me, she fondly recalls his enthusiastic daily greetings and her current sense of feeling “unmoored and bereft.” Hembree stresses that grief for pets is too often underestimated or discouraged.
Hembree cites another source from Mindsite, an article by Paige Bierma that affirms the value of mourning, arguing that the stages follow the same process as occurs with the death of a human loved one—guilt, denial, and sadness that can turn into depression (https://mindsitenews.org/2024/06/19/when-a-pet-dies/). I certainly would not want to challenge how intensely one can feel in mourning a pet; however, I would not place much stock in such a uniform process. We grieve in different ways, and stage theories have been criticized on several grounds, especially because they seem anxious to put an endpoint on mourning, rather than seeing it as an experience that recurs with certain stimuli. For example, there are benches in Riverside Park that strongly evoke memories of both of our dogs, Sonia and Pretzel. When I sit on the benches, I experience a reactivation of sadness mixed with love, which is uplifting, and which I have no intention to terminate. The truth is that grief resists following predictable paths. Surrendering to its unpredictability, in fact, is part of what can make the experience meaningful. A fine example is found in Sloane Crosley’s recent memoir, Grief is for People, in which two, unrelated incidents get fused, a break-in and theft from her apartment and the suicide of her mentor and friend.[ii]
Here’s a related, but controversial thought about mourning for an animal or for a human. In one sense, regarding them as the same elevates and dignifies mourning for an animal. In another sense, though, I am inclined to argue that mourning for an animal can be different, but not any less meaningful, than mourning for a human. Dogs can feel like they are part of the family, so their death hits hard. Still, in my experience, which may not be universal, mourning for human loved ones is rooted in a history and mode of communication that is distinct. In mourning humans, I can call upon what they thought and believed and valued, and my suppositions are drawn from their confirmations or disconfirmations. Such elaborations linger and are precious to recall and honor. This entails no diminishing of mourning for an animal, nor does it need to make a claim for our superiority.
Let me take my argument one step further. Humans and dogs have long lived side by side, and this has had reciprocal benefits for both of us. However, our understanding of pets often includes tyrannical mentalizing, not to mention good old projection. Alexandra Horowitz’s excellent piece on cloning, where people pay $50,000 to clone their pet, makes it abundantly clear how much people’s fantasies about their pets inspires this choice (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/would-you-clone-your-dog). Horowitz documents the unsavory side of the cloning business and raises ethical qualms that ought to concern us. Reading this piece made me wonder: does an intolerance of loss underlie the wish to clone? Why does it seem so different (and much more concerning) to imagine cloning humans?
An even stranger example is found in Amia Srinivasan’s review of a book about bestiality and zoophilia by the historian Joanna Bourke (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n19/amia-srinivasan/what-does-fluffy-think).[iii] The book suggests that sex between humans and animals belongs to our history and is more common than we might think. It acknowledges the wrongness of instances of violent rape, but also addresses encounters that occur mutually and tenderly. Does sex between humans and animals push us in a more egalitarian direction or should it read as additional documentation of our need to dominate animals? Does the taboo against bestiality represent a form of speciesism, as the animal rights author and philosopher Peter Singer is credited with believing? Srinivasan is inclined to disagree with Singer, introducing the feminist argument that men seek to dominate animals in a way that is consistent with how they have dominated women. The piece culminates with a reflection about how Srinivasan feels about getting her dog, Goose, spayed. She knows that it might seem to be the epitome of human domination; yet she also notes that it provides a sense of freedom (from pregnancy) that she imagines Goose is thrilled to have.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written about our relation to animals in highly original ways, pushing us to contemplate matters of justice and ethics (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/what-we-owe-our-fellow-animals-ethics-martha-nussbaum/?lp_txn_id=1562343). Her starting point is that “a revolution of knowledge is revealing the enormous richness and cognitive complexity of animal lives, which prominently include intricate social groups, emotional responses, and even cultural learning.” She makes the argument that we need rethink our relation to animals, recognizing what we share, but also that animals have abilities that differ from and surpass human ones. Some amazing examples are echolocation, flight using an internal magnetic field sensor, and complex forms of cultural learning that involve only females.
Based upon what we are learning, Nussbaum believes we should forge a just and fair ethical stance toward animals. She defends a species-specific perspective, one that is committed to demystifying the relation. Nussbaum introduces specific recommendations, too, like banning dolphins and whales from captivity. I admire Nussbaum’s view that research should lead the way in how we (re)conceptualize our relation to animals and that there is an ethical challenge to treat animals better without obscuring how they differ from us. We are at an early stage of imagining what it would look like to give up the romanticizing of animals as well as its less acknowledged flip side of exploitation.
Back to Mr. P, one of Pretzel’s 10 or 11 nicknames. He was loved, and he loved us. Our species differences were not eradicated, but they were mediated. Stll, I cannot deny how painful it was, as he weakened, not to know more about how he felt. It was not just a matter of words. A difference was apparent that became absorbed in the sadness of death. No cloning for us. After the commotion of death, what then?
What happened after death, for me, was the gradual emergence of cherished memories. Pretzel was exquisitely sensitive, for example, to noticing when and if suitcases came down from the closet. In fact, he was even responsive to hearing the word “suitcase,” so we had to resort to code and used the word “banana” as a substitute. In his mind, I believe, suitcases connoted a fear of being abandoned, and being abandoned had a catastrophic edge. (The fact that he came with us on some trips did not seem to matter). If we were not looking, Pretzel would resolve his agony by jumping into the suitcase. And if you do not believe me, here’s the proof:
Photos by Rebecca Wharton.
[i] M. Oliver (2013). Dog Songs. New York: Penguin.
[ii] S. Crosley (2024). Grief is for People. London: Serpent’s Tail.
[iii] The historian Joanna Bourke has written on many topics, sexual assault, intimate killing in combat, pain and fear. Her book, Fear: A Cultural History, is one of my favorite books, documenting how mobile the meaning of that emotion is in different times and different places.
.