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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Humanities and Social Sciences
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1526302
This article is part of the Research TopicAnimal wellbeing, conservation, research, and education: Supporting people in caring professionsView all 9 articles
Animal Ethical Mourning: Types of loss and grief in relation to nonhuman animals
Provisionally accepted
Panu Pihkala1*
Elisa Aaltola2- 1University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- 2University of Turku, Turku, Southwest Finland, Finland
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People can feel various kinds of loss and grief in relation to non-human animals. This has been increasingly studied in relation to pets and companion animals., and rRecent explorations of ecological grief include wildlife loss, and emerging studies observe grief among veterinarian professionals, zoo personnel, and animal researchers. People can mourn many kinds of animals, including farmed animals, but there is a need for more research on the topic. However, people can also mourn the sufferings of farmed animals and laboratory animals, but this has been much less studied. In this interdisciplinary article, we draw attention to various forms of what we call animal ethical mourning: grief experienced as a consequence of moral commitment to animals. We chart many new aspects by applying Pihkala's recent framework of Ecological Sorrow (2024) into three case examples: companion animal grief (including pets), wildlife grief, and farmed animal grief. We find many kinds of loss and grief in relation to the case examples, and we propose two new terms for socially contradicted forms of animal ethical mourning: "contested grief" and "contrapuntal grief". The results are useful for anyone who either experiences animal ethical mourning or wishes to provide more understanding for it in societies. The findings can also inform practices in workplaces which include animals.
Keywords: grief, animal studies, ecological grief, Extinction studies, Companion animal, wildlife, Animal Rights, disenfranchised grief
Received: 15 Nov 2024; Accepted: 07 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pihkala and Aaltola. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Panu Pihkala, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
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