Supposedly, elephants trekked to a house to mourn a human

[frogmarch]

72. Maybe it’s not true,

but I know that non-human animals – at least some of them – do grieve over the loss of their friends, whether human or non-human. When one of our pets dies, the surviving pet despairs.

The morning after our beloved poodle, our only pet at the time, died of old age and we’d buried him in our woods in a coffin we made for him, his many (14) feral cat friends gathered in a circle around his grave and sat there silently for about 15 minutes. (No, they didn’t dig or anything. They all just sat there in a circle, silent and motionless, like little statues.) Then they all left together, and we never saw them again. I like thinking they were paying their last respects to their dear friend, but so what if they weren’t and their gathering together by the grave was just a weird cat behavioral thing going on? Thinking they were saying goodbye to their doggy friend is a nice thought, but were they? No one will ever know, either way.