One in twelve cases of prolonged grief disorder in the UK stems from the death of a pet — not a distant second to human loss, but statistically indistinguishable from it.
A new study of 975 UK adults, published in PLOS One, found that 7.5% of people who lost a pet met diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief disorder (PGD). That's the same rate as grief following the death of a close friend, and only slightly lower than after losing a grandparent (8.3%), sibling (8.9%), or partner (9.1%). Only the death of a parent (11.2%) or child (21.3%) triggered significantly higher rates.
What might surprise you: about one in five people who'd experienced both pet and human losses said the animal's death was harder to process. Not because they loved the pet more in some abstract sense, but because the grief itself — the symptoms, the duration, the weight of it — felt just as real.
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Professor Philip Hyland of Maynooth University, who led the research, argues that current diagnostic guidelines for PGD are incomplete. They exclude pet loss from what counts as a "significant bereavement," which he calls both scientifically inaccurate and "callous."
The logic is straightforward: if grief over a pet produces identical symptoms to grief over a human — the intrusive thoughts, the yearning, the struggle to accept the loss — then pretending it's a lesser form of suffering isn't science. It's gatekeeping.
There's a social dimension too. People often minimize pet loss in conversation ("It was just a dog"), which can leave grieving pet owners feeling isolated, unable to talk openly about their pain. The research gives language to what many already know: the bond with a pet is real, and so is the loss.
Hyland's work presents what he calls "consistent and compelling evidence" that diagnostic frameworks should expand to recognize pet loss as a legitimate bereavement trigger. Some grief specialists and mental health organizations are already moving in this direction, acknowledging that a 15-year companionship ending deserves the same clinical respect as any other profound loss.
The next step is whether major diagnostic manuals — the ones therapists and psychiatrists use — will catch up.
