How Animals Grieve Read Online Free

fuming.” Turning to look, he sees not Pollux but another ox. “Castor misses his partner,” writes Renard, “and seeing the troubled eye of this unknown ox next to him, he stops chewing.”
    How much feeling Renard crams into this understated passage. Castor isn’t content with just any ox; it’s Pollux he knows, Pollux he misses. Animals matter to each other as individuals. Sisters matter.
    Eventually, Karen and Ron did adopt a young cat named Amy, a gorgeous Russian blue with a pretty “locket” of white hairs on her upper chest. Amy had been left at an animal shelter by a breeder of pure Russian blue cats; those few white hairs, not standard for her breed, reduced her value. (Amy’s rejection by the breeder strengthens my resolve to adopt animals from shelters or other rescue organizations, as we have done with our six indoor cats.) When Karen visited the shelter in search of a companion for Willa, Amy climbed into her lap and settled into a purr. And just as Amy chose Karen that day, Karen chose Amy.
    In bringing Amy home to Willa, Karen hoped to tap into a phenomenon that animal-behavior scientists discovered decades ago: When emotionally troubled, a social animal may reap great benefits from caring for a younger companion. This principle was driven home in the aftermath of the “separation experiments” done in the 1960s by Harry Harlow and his colleagues, who sought to understand the nature of the mother-infant bond in monkeys and what happens in its absence.
    These scientists famously demonstrated that six months’ or a year’s worth of isolation caused young rhesus monkeys to become psychologically disturbed. Without the company and comfort of their mothers or other companions, the monkeys rocked back and forth, clasped themselves, and acted exactly like what they were, severely depressed primates. It’s painful to read about these experiments now, because the monkeys suffered so much to prove a point that in retrospect looks startlingly obvious.
    When introduced to other monkeys their age who had been reared normally, these disturbed monkeys couldn’t cope well. Lacking social experience, they knew nothing of the right signals to give their peers to bring about positive encounters. But when given a chance to spend time with normal younger monkeys, even the harmed, broken, motherless monkeys began to improve. The younger monkeys functioned, the scientists found, as therapists of a sort. In a classic paper published in 1971, Harlow and Stephen Suomi wrote, “6-month-old social isolates exposed to 3-month-old normal monkeys achieved essentially complete social recovery.”
    What the monkey experiments demonstrated is the balm of responding, even when in emotional pain, to creatures who are younger and less threatening. Of course, Willa was not a social isolate, so the analogy with the monkey experiments only goes so far. But the idea is broadly similar. When Amy first arrived in the house, Willa vocalized her objection. She made a noise wholly unlike her Carson-wail, a growl more like the roar of a tiny lion. And with it, the point was made: Willa was not thrilled to have this unfamiliar cat, however young and unthreatening, on her turf.
    Soon, though, Willa began to engage more actively with what was happening around her than she had in months. She actively sought to be in the same room as the new arrival. “Willa had something new to think about,” Karen told me with a smile. Even though her first response wasn’t a warm one, Willa was coaxed by Amy’s presence out of her diminished state, the condition of mild emotional detachment in which she had dwelled since the loss of Carson.
    At first, Willa and Amy, even if in the same room, kept their distance. Only in one situation did they tolerate each other’s nearness: when both wanted to be physically close to Karen. When Karen relaxed on the couch or reclined in bed, the two cats took up positions on either side of her—safely separated by the