So can a dog really die of a broken heart?

 

Did a broken heart kill Theo, the bomb-sniffing spaniel, who died in Afghanistan shortly after losing his handler, Lance Corporal Liam Tasker? Well, I certainly know dogs mourn their owners when they die.

I once witnessed a neighbour’s sheepdog wait for weeks, then months stretching into years, for the return of her master. She sat on the pathway outside his house, the place where he would normally whistle for her to come with him, rooted to the spot. She couldn’t be tempted by food, either by me or her master’s widow, to go for a walk.

She just waited patiently for the man she loved who would never, alas, come home. Hour after hour, day after day she waited, coming into the house only at night for a meal and to sleep before venturing out onto the pathway again in the morning. 

Lance Corporal Liam Tasker with his army dog Theo in the war zone

And there are countless other stories too, like that of the legendary Skye terrier, Greyfriars Bobby, who formed an extraordinarily close relationship in the 19th century with his owner John Gray, a night watchman for the Edinburgh City Police.

After two years together, John Gray died of tuberculosis and was buried in the graveyard surrounding Greyfriars Kirk in the Old Town of Edinburgh.

Bobby, who survived Gray by 14 years, is said to have spent the rest of his life sitting on his master’s grave — leaving for  meals at a nearby restaurant — and became the subject of biographies, a novel, two films and a commemorative statue.

Last month a mongrel called Leao was photographed lying mournfully by his owner’s makeshift grave in south-east Brazil after the flooding there that killed more than 600 people. 

Working: L/Cpl Liam Tasker, with Theo, training in Camp Bastion

The tragic case of a 14-year-old Jack Russell called Squeak made headlines, too, in 2002 when he refused to move from the mutilated body of his owner, Terry Ford, after he was murdered in Zimbabwe. Squeak eventually had to be carried away by an animal rescue charity.

The truth is that dogs and other pets really do grieve for their owners, and in some cases the consequences can be fatal.

Animal psychologist Roger Mugford, who has advised the Queen on her often quarrelsome corgis, knows a number of cases in which pets have died of grief.

‘The most recent concerned a spaniel owned by an old gentleman who died,’ he says. ‘The dog, which had been perfectly healthy, pined for him and was dead within three weeks.’

The most likely explanation, says Dr Mugford, is that dogs — which are very sociable animals — suffer from a kind of depression which inhibits not only their appetites but also their immune system. This makes them susceptible to infection and can be fatal.

  

Grief: The story of Greyfriars Bobby became the subject of films, including 'The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby' (2006) starring Oliver Golding and canine co-star Bobby the west highland terrier

‘It is highly unusual,’ adds Dr Mugford. ‘Dogs have an extraordinary survival instinct and, although we might not like to believe it, most would quickly adapt to new owners.

‘But in some intense relationships — particularly like the one between Theo and his owner in Afghanistan where they are working together in very stressful conditions — the dog and his owner can become all too inseparable.’

Scientists are beginning to study this love (or attachment, as they so dryly call it) between dog and man using a special procedure called the Ainsworth Strange Situation test.

It was originally used on babies. The infants are separated for a short period from their mother, and their attachment is measured by their behaviour when abandoned by her and when picked up again on return.

It’s now been adapted by Italian researchers for dogs, and dog owners among us won’t be surprised to hear that the dogs behaved rather like the babies — though with different doggy gestures. Left alone, they searched for their ‘lost’ owner, trying to follow them out of the room, jumping at the door and even whimpering or howling.

Some dogs get so closely attached to their owners that if they are left alone they go berserk, tearing up the furniture, or even trying to dig themselves out through the front door. Their owners may come home to find them with bleeding paws. 

It’s called ‘separation distress,’ and can prove a difficult problem to solve — even for dog behaviourists — and any punishment simply makes these poor dogs even more desolate and frantic.

One of the leading scientists in this field, neuroscientist Professor Jaak Panksepp, faced great difficulty getting funds for his research several years ago because the idea of testing the emotions of animals was thought to be unscientific. 

Sorrow: Animal psychologist Roger Mugford, who has advised the Queen on her dogs, knows a number of cases in which pets have died of grief

However, he persisted with his studies and has now mapped animal brains and found that emotions such as happiness, sadness and separation anxiety are hardwired into them.

So it is not just dogs that mourn like this. Cats do too — as I can vouch from my own experience. I work as a volunteer for the charity Cats Protection, and it is deeply upsetting to see the elderly cats come into care, whose owners have just died or been taken into a nursing home.

For the first few days they sit immobile, as if stunned at the loss. It can take weeks before they fully recover any joy in life.

So, too, do elephants clearly feel emotional pain. Should one of the herd die, its elephant family will gather solemnly around the body and gently touch the body with their trunks.

For several years afterwards, if they are marching past where the corpse lies they will touch the whitened bones. Elephants never forget, as it were. 

Mourning: Leao sits next to the grave of her owner, Cristina Maria Cesario Santana, who died in catastrophic landslides in Brazil in January 

(http://todaysdailypoop.blogspot.com/2011/01/normal-0-microsoftinternetexplorer4_7255.html)

We also know that elephant babies who lose their mothers to poachers show all the signs of frantic distress. The orphans that are taken to the sanctuary run by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Africa are often sunk in depression for weeks. A personal keeper has to sleep with them at night so that they are not left alone.

I wonder if Theo the dog was treated like this, or was he, perhaps, just put in a kennel to grieve till his heart broke?

Even magpies have been seen ‘burying’ their dead. In 2009, one of the world’s foremost researchers into animal emotions, Dr Mark Bekoff, reported seeing a group of magpies react to the body of a fellow bird that had been hit by a car.

Two of the magpies gently pecked at the corpse with their beaks. Then a couple of the birds went off and fetched some grass which they laid by the body. The birds ‘stood vigil’ for a few moments and then flew off.

In a particularly horrible experiment carried out in the Fifties in America, monkeys suffered severe emotional distress when they were forced to inflict pain on each other.

One monkey was trained to press a lever every 20 seconds. If he stopped pressing it, a neighbouring monkey was given an electric shock.

The monkey in control of the lever became so stressed by his horrible role that after 23 days of this he died of stomach ulcers — so stressed had it become that its stomach acidity had risen enormously. What a pity that the scientist concerned wasn’t inflicted by stomach ulcers too!

In 2005, a keeper at Boston Zoo reported that the death of a gorilla called Babs had a desolate effect on her long-term mate who was left howling and tried to put a bit of celery — Babs’s favourite food —  in her hand and to wake her up.

There is abundant scientific evidence now, as well as any number of anecdotal examples, that animals desperately mourn the loss of a loved one, and that pets are often overcome with grief when their owners pass on.

The surprise is not that a dog can die of a broken heart — as in poor Theo’s case — but that so many humans still dismiss the notion of animals expressing emotion as sentimental, anthropomorphic rubbish.

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