Do dogs mourn? There is no question in any dog owner’s mind that their dog is happy to see them and enjoys their company and is sad when they leave. I had a dog that figured out a strategy to eat my lunch. She ran to the front door barking, and I and all the other dogs went to check who was there.

Meanwhile, the original barker had climbed up on my chair and was happily finishing my sandwich. Any dog owner would agree: that dog was thinking, remembering and planning. Scientists are catching up to dog owners; studies have been done and surveys taken, and the verdict seems to be that animals do have emotions and intelligence.

Charles Darwin described animal emotion, but until recently, only the “higher” animals – that is, human – could be considered to have feelings. Researchers kept trying to explain animal behaviour without animal emotion or thought and came up with some pretty weird explanations for the behaviour they were seeing. Lay people could look at a dog and see sadness, happiness or jealousy. A scientist would call that anthropomorphizing instinctive behaviours. According to the old science model, a dog that is subdued and won’t eat after a loved one has passed away is simply reacting to the change in routine and different smells, but nearly anybody would describe that dog as being sad.

Although dogs and other animals have been characterized as machine-like automatons that respond to outside stimuli with instinctive responses but no will or cognition, this kind of thinking is changing as scientists find more and more similarities in animal brains and human brains.

Other animals have some of the same structures in their brains as human animals; those areas of the brain release the same chemicals under the same conditions. The limbic system is responsible for emotions and feelings such as anger, fear, love, hate, sadness and joy, as well as some functions of memory and personal identity. We share the limbic system with all the other complex vertebrates.

Humans tend to assume that dogs and other animals don’t understand things because they do not speak our language and haven’t built cathedrals and computers. In all the literature about dogs, it is common to see the words, “They don’t understand.” I think it is fair to say that dogs don’t understand how to cook or read a book, but they do understand how to make me open a door. We suppose that dogs don’t understand death because they cannot talk about it.

Animals have been dying since the beginning of time – killing and being killed, dying of diseases, dying of old age. I think they may know about death.

Twice over the years when a dog has passed away in my house, all the other dogs came and gave their old mate a sniff, then walked away. They appeared to understand very clearly that the other dog was no longer living. Of course, the dogs didn’t write a paper on how they felt and they didn’t light candles and ask for black collars, but they where subdued for a few days and clearly missed their friend. Not exactly like Greyfriars Bobby, the Skye Terrier who guarded his owner’s grave for 14 years, only leaving the spot for food, but still an indication that they where affected by the loss.

I asked well-known author and psychologist Dr. Stanley Coren if he believes dogs mourn. He said, “The mind of a dog is approximately equal to a human two year old.

They have basic emotions such as fear, anger and love. Love is a basic emotion; withdrawal of love will cause grief and loss. Dogs are capable of love and therefore capable of feeling the loss of a loved one. The degree to which they will express that emotion depends on the degree of social interaction and the individual dog.

“When ‘Odin’ my Flat-coated Retriever passed away, his buddy ‘Dancer,’ the Nova Scotia Duck Toller, acted despondent and would go and check the four places in the house where Odin was likely to be, then go to the middle of the room and whine. So I managed his grief the way you would a small child. I filled his mind with other things by taking him to work with me for two weeks. Just so you all know I am not being airy-fairy here, dogs produce oxytocin, one of the main chemicals associated with love in humans in what people would call affectionate situations such as being petted and praised.”

Frequent Dogs in Canada contributor, best-selling author and dog behaviourist Jean Donaldson answered the question in her usual comprehensive style. “It seems implausible that dogs, who bond so strongly, would not feel really bad when someone they’re close to disappears. Now, whether they have the accompanying cognitions that so complicate human grief is something I’m less convinced of. I know people whose dogs have struggled with the loss of a family member (people and dogs), becoming depressed, anxious, lost and rudderless. And I can see how this could be compounded by changes in routine brought on by the grieving process of remaining family members.”

So it seems the experts and the rest of us are on the same page when it comes to our dogs and their feelings. We know that we feel terrible when a beloved pet dies, and it seems our pets feel the same way when somebody they love passes away. The human/animal bond is a two-way street: Our dogs don’t just have behaviours we interpret as affection because we are needy human beings; our dogs truly do reciprocate our love and feel the joy and sorrow of true friendship.