How Animals Grieve (6 page)

Mary’s story about Storm became a catalyst for me, as I was unfamiliar with horses either personally or in my work on animal emotion. To horse people, I soon found out, the notion of a horse circle, or indeed of equine grief, was anything but new.

At one time, Janelle Helling managed a ranch in the Colorado mountains, with twenty or thirty horses in residence. One morning, the herd failed to make its way to the barn-corral area for feeding as it usually did. A mare had foaled during the night, and the newborn was too weak to stand. “The rest of the horses were circled around the mare and foal,” Janelle recalls, “and would not let us get near them. The horses refused to be herded away from acting as a barrier between us and the mare and foal.”

That barrier was protective in nature. In that area of Colorado, mountain lion, bear, and coyote are indigenous, so perhaps the horses were hypervigilant for predators. But they clearly had people on their minds too. Only when Janelle arranged for a trailer to collect the mare and foal could the barrier be breached and the foal given proper medical attention.
As
the trailer bearing the mother and infant headed back to the barn, the other horses followed closely.

The foal survived, so fortunately this anecdote does not qualify as a grief story. And
this
horse circle differed in character from the quiet, still, one that formed around Storm Warning’s grave. Here, the horses made a blur of motion, some moving clockwise, others counterclockwise. “Trotting, wheeling, kicking, galloping hoofed chaos,” Helling recalls. She is certain that no predator, or person, could have breached that moving circle. Could the protective intent of this horse circle suggest a new possibility in relation to the geldings who surrounded Storm Warning? Perhaps they had intuited a connection between Storm and the mound that had appeared in their field, and by encircling it they meant to protect that spot and thus Storm himself. Could the horses somehow have thought that Storm might reappear? Or were they in fact mourning him?

The fact of the horse circle cannot in itself answer the question of what went on in Storm’s companions’ minds. But the anecdote does help to refute what some naysayers insist: that what we interpret as horse grief must instead express a feeling of vulnerability caused by separation from the herd. On this skeptical view, “grief” is an overstated claim, because the horses are only demonstrating the anxiety that besets a survivor in a herd-oriented species. Yet this “herd mentality” explanation doesn’t match up with what happened after Storm died. The surviving horses placed themselves in a specific configuration and expressed no agitation through their body language. Their group was intact, save one; they had no reason to feel vulnerable. Even though we cannot intuit precisely what the horses may have been feeling, it’s clear enough that something unusual was going on, beyond a concern for the self.

Responding to an article on horse grief by Kenneth Marcella in
Thoroughbred Times
, a reader described the events that unfolded after her thoroughbred filly lost her companion. This other horse, Silver, had died suddenly, and his body was visible to the filly. While Silver was buried, she was turned into a separate field. When she later returned to the field they had shared, she stationed herself on top of the grave and pawed the ground. Indifferent to offers of food and companionship, coming in at night only when forced to do so, she persisted in her behavior for almost two weeks.

Can
the science of horse behavior help us understand this reaction? In his article, Marcella observes that an increase in horse longevity in the last fifteen years means that “equine buddies” now spend significantly longer periods of time together. Some horses who lose longtime friends may fall into outright depression. This is what happened with Tony and Pops, two workhorses who had known each in years past and met again at the time of their retirement. Once they rediscovered each other, these two were rarely apart. After Pops died, Tony lost weight, stopped interacting with other horses, and became lethargic enough that he lost muscle. His arthritis flared up.

In the horse world, this situation is often diagnosed as depression and treated accordingly, with anything from extra attention from human companions to doses of Valium. For horses, depression may exacerbate physical ailments such as colic, so breaking the cycle of mourning, falling sick, and becoming more depressed is potentially urgent. The introduction of a new companion may help, just as we have seen with other animals. One
Thoroughbred Times
reader told of her horse, who mourned when his pasturemate of twenty-three years died. For two weeks he stood in a spot, under a favorite tree, that he had often shared with his friend. He would not eat. Only when a mare died during foaling, and he began to care for her orphan, did his behavior turn around.

I’ve next to no personal experience with horses, beyond admiring their grace and intelligence—though I did, during a fourth-grade class outing, fall off a horse and still retain a memory of that long trip to the ground. Just as I remain impressed with the sheer size and power of horses, I have come to admire many horse people’s embrace of horse grief and their efforts to ease it. Marcella even highlights individual variation in grief behavior, which is consonant with cutting edge animal-behavior science. As with cats, dogs, and other animals, not all horses grieve when a companion dies; the continuum of reactions ranges from extreme depression, such as I’ve been describing, to apparent indifference.

When a foal dies, some mares vocalize and act in an anxious manner. Others have little visible reaction. Given the strength of the mammalian mother-infant bond, I was at first surprised to learn that some horse mothers don’t grieve for their foals. But on second thought, it fit with my knowledge of other animals. Through her study of chimpanzees, Jane
Goodall
has expanded scientists’ thinking about the variable quality of maternal behavior. Caring, competent mothers exist side by side with indifferent, neglectful mothers among our closest living relatives—indeed, within our own species—so why not in other animals too? It’s possible, as well, that a mother who appears indifferent in the presence of her dead offspring may have been quite nurturing when the baby was alive, actively eliciting her care.

One pattern does seem to hold for horses, according to experts in equine behavior. “Horses given the opportunity to interact with a dead pasture mate,” Marcella reports, “generally show less vocalization and anxiety and return to normal behavior more quickly.” It has become a common practice to ensure that surviving horses view the body of their dead companion, in the belief that this may help them cope. What is needed for the scientific investigation of horse grief and its amelioration is a database, compiled in a consistent and rigorous manner, of reports that demonstrate a full range of outcomes, from horses who are helped by viewing a companion’s body to those—like the filly who repeatedly pawed at her friend Silver’s grave even after viewing his body—who are not.

Laying out the body for viewing by animals at risk for grief is an increasingly popular practice in other contexts as well. In zoos and private homes, and on farms, it’s adopted by people who know that animals grieve and who want to ease that grief. It’s a strategy that seemed to work with a goat named Myrtle. Myrtle knew her own mind. Adopted into a home in Colorado, she repeatedly escaped into a neighbor’s yard where she could be with the only remotely goatlike animals nearby—horses. Again and again, she was brought back home, only to escape again. Finally, the wayward goat was allowed to stay where she clearly wanted to be, at the neighbor’s house.

Janelle Helling, who described the horses’ protective circle around a newborn foal, was the horse-owning neighbor in question. She decided that Myrtle deserved the opportunity to enjoy the companionship not only of horses but of other goats. She confesses that it wasn’t a decision reached solely out of compassion for a lonely goat; there was also the matter of Myrtle’s wanderlust. Whenever Janelle rode a horse off her property, Myrtle would trot behind. This wasn’t safe, given local traffic.
So
Janelle adopted a goat called Blondie, hoping that Myrtle might take to her and that the two goats might become homebodies together.

The plan succeeded. Four or five years older than Myrtle, Blondie was no restless wanderer. She stayed put at Janelle’s. The two goats hit it off right away, and soon Myrtle began to stay home too. Janelle estimates that Myrtle and Blondie were almost always within twenty feet of one another, and often much closer. “If one of them showed up without the other,” she remembers, “you knew something was wrong.” A few times, one or the other would manage to get her head and horns stuck in a wire fence, requiring rescue by a human with wire cutters. Most of the time, though, Myrtle and Blondie spent the day comfortably grazing, chewing cud, playing, and napping.

Several years passed in this fashion. Then one autumn, Blondie became ill and her condition deteriorated quickly. Despite penicillin injections to combat a respiratory infection, Blondie died. This happened early on a Saturday morning, and Janelle left the goat’s body unburied through the weekend as she waited to request a postmortem at the vet’s. Myrtle was distressed by her friend’s sudden disappearance. “Myrtle ran around the pasture vocalizing all day Saturday,” Janelle says. “It was a panic-stricken scream that made your hair stand on end. She ran laps in the pasture, looking for Blondie in all their usual hangouts.”

Janelle decided to arrange Blondie’s body in a natural sleeping position and to make sure Myrtle could see it. That way, Myrtle wouldn’t be left in the dark, as if her companion had vanished into thin air. In one sense at least, this decision paid off. Once Myrtle caught sight of Blondie, inert on the ground, her screaming and tearing around ceased. She gazed and sniffed at the body, staying with Blondie for at least twenty minutes. Myrtle then trotted away and drank some water, but immediately she returned to her old friend. Repeatedly over the next hours, Myrtle left Blondie, only to return again. Janelle interpreted this behavior as confusion, an attempt to work out why her normally active friend should be lying still. Gradually, Myrtle began to spend shorter periods with Blondie, with longer intervals between visits.

At some point, Myrtle headed out to the horse pasture. Even from there, she occasionally walked back to Blondie. By the time Monday came, though, and Blondie’s body was to be taken away, Myrtle showed
no
interest in it. Originally, when she couldn’t find her friend, Myrtle had gone into a frenzy. When Janelle oriented her toward Blondie’s body, Myrtle showed keen interest; the body drew her back like a magnet. Gradually, that interest faded. Myrtle had literally moved on, away from the body; perhaps she moved on mentally as well.

Other animals may show symptoms of mourning longer than Myrtle did, even to the extent of prolonged suffering. Perhaps the mental capacities of a goat don’t match those of some other mammals, but I think the more likely explanation is that this expression of grief was just Myrtle’s style. Other goats might mourn differently. Myrtle reminds us, again, that grief has no singular face.

To this day, Janelle wonders if Myrtle’s experience of losing Blondie was so intense in part because of her social history. As a youngster, before she was adopted by the family next door, Myrtle had been confined alone (that is, without other nonhumans) for about a year. “As social as goats are,” Janelle notes, “that would have been extremely traumatic.” Myrtle’s first real ties were to horses. And when Blondie died, starting with the period when Myrtle transitioned away from the body, it was to horses that Myrtle went for company. Comfort knows no species bounds.

The personalities, emotions, and interior lives of farm animals—goats, pigs, cows, and domestic birds, among others—have gone largely unexplored. That situation is changing, as is beautifully demonstrated by the stories collected in Amy Hatkoff’s book
The Inner World of Farm Animals
. When a cow named Debbie collapsed at the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary, other cows encircled her and bellowed so forcefully that the caretakers took notice. A veterinarian determined that Debbie’s arthritis was causing her to suffer severely, and the cow was euthanized. When Debbie was buried, the other cows gathered around and vocalized with plaintive moos. Jenny Brown, the sanctuary’s cofounder, observed the animals’ bereavement. Not only did the cows lie down on the grave, Brown noted, “the whole group went off together somewhere on our four hundred acres and didn’t come back for grains for two days. I never expected a reaction like this. I had no idea they were so aware of each other and so bonded.”

Hatkoff
tells also of the pigs Winnie and Buster, who had been fast friends since they were piglets at the Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. Five years later, Buster died. Winnie stayed to herself, refused any opportunity to interact with other pigs, and lost weight. Though healthy enough in a physical sense, she was clearly not thriving emotionally. Only when a new group of piglets arrived at the sanctuary did her mood improve. She began to run, spin, and play with the piglets and slept with them at night, all behaviors reminiscent of her patterns with Buster, who by then had been gone for two years.

Last year, I adopted a chicken at Farm Sanctuary. Fiesta is a striking black hen who was found wandering a park in the Bronx. Her rescuers think she may have escaped from a Santeria ritual involving animal sacrifice, purportedly the source of dead chickens found previously in the neighborhood. Whether that was the case or not, the homeless hen was brought to safety. My adoption of her doesn’t mean that Fiesta now strides around my backyard, dodging our cats; it’s just that I help pay for her care at the Watkins Glen sanctuary.

With two more facilities in California and a significant national presence, Farm Sanctuary protects farm animals and urges people to think about them in fresh ways. Farm animals are “someone, not something,” as a recent campaign puts it. “We can tell you from personal experience,” staff members write on the Farm Sanctuary website, “that farm animals have the same range of personalities and interests as cats and dogs.”