When Animals Die

1. The Place They Leave Behind

An empty basket can change the feeling of a room. A lead still hangs beside the door. The hour arrives when a familiar face would usually appear, asking for food, a walk or a little attention. The practical world continues, but one of its quiet centres has gone.

HIERATIC016 asked how we might live with death, grief and impermanence. This companion asks us to include the animals whose lives have become entangled with ours. What space do we make for their dying, for our grief and for experiences that do not fit easily into ordinary conversation?

We can begin with care. A person should not have to prove a theory of consciousness before their loss receives our attention. Nor should someone have to adopt a spiritual interpretation in order to remember an animal with love.

2. What Was Observed, What Was Felt?

Three questions guide this essay. What did an animal do? What did a person experience? What explanation might account for either? Keeping those questions visible gives wonder somewhere to go without asking certainty to arrive ahead of evidence.

An account may be moving at all three levels. Yet an interpretation such as “she came to say goodbye” adds something to “she approached each person”. We can honour the first phrase as the witness’s meaning while preserving the second as the more bounded observation.

3. Reports From the End of an Animal’s Life

In 2023, Rupert Sheldrake, Pam Smart and Michael Nahm published a preliminary collection of owner-reported behaviour around animals’ deaths. They classified 114 examples, presenting 43 in the paper and 71 in supplementary material. The categories include apparent farewells, final rallies and possible terminal lucidity. These are parts of one collection, rather than independent studies.[1]

The study offers descriptions worth investigating. Its retrospective, self-selected reports do not establish how often such behaviour occurs or what causes it. The authors themselves discuss shared physiology as one possible explanation for similarities with human dying.[1]

For AkashicNET, this opens a comparative question: what would we need to observe before describing an episode as lucidity? A brief increase in movement and a return of previously lost recognition would require different evidence. Our proposed terminology should follow the detail available in each case.

There is also an ethical boundary for any future investigation. Recording an event should never become more important than the animal’s comfort. A research protocol should put veterinary care first and allow a family to stop recording without explanation.

4. Experiences After the Loss

A separate 2024 paper by James G. Matlock, Bethany Hilton, Sheldrake, Smart and Nahm collected 442 accounts of apparent after-death communication involving animals. Sources included public appeals, Facebook groups and published accounts. Reported experiences included dreams, sensed presence and visual, auditory or tactile encounters. “After-death communication” is the authors’ category, not an established causal finding.[2]

The collection is heterogeneous and largely anecdotal. Its methods did not provide systematic independent verification of every account. It can help organise testimony and generate questions; it cannot determine prevalence among bereaved people or establish contact with deceased animals.[2]

A separate study by Jennifer Golbeck, published online on 25 March 2024 in Anthrozoös, analysed 544 social-media comments about deceased dogs. Its themes distinguished sensory encounters from interpreted signs and dreams. Of the feelings reported, 74.6% were classified as positive. This is a finding about the accounts’ emotional meaning, not the proportion of all bereaved dog owners who experience contact.[3]

The study adds a direct discussion of comfort and grief that receives limited social recognition. Its selected online comments cannot establish supernatural causation or a treatment benefit. We do not add its 544 comments to the other paper’s 442 accounts: they use different collection methods, and overlap has not been audited.

Someone reading these accounts may recognise an experience of their own. Another reader may recognise nothing similar. This essay asks neither reader to change their account to match the collection. A quiet absence belongs in our understanding of grief too.

If we invite testimony, our invitation should make room for “nothing happened”, “I am unsure” and “my interpretation changed”. Otherwise we risk building an archive that reflects the questions we prefer to ask.

5. A Bond Can Continue Without a Verdict

Human bereavement research provides useful context. A 2020 interdisciplinary review by Karina Stengaard Kamp and colleagues examined sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of deceased people. It concluded that most are benign and should be understood in their personal, relational and cultural setting. That review concerns human loss; it is not an independent validation of the animal accounts.[4]

Its relevance here is an approach to listening. We might ask what an experience meant, whether it brought comfort or distress and how the person wishes to speak about it. Those questions leave room for a spiritual understanding, a psychological understanding or an unresolved one.

For this companion, “continuing bonds” also names an ordinary practice of remembrance: keeping a photograph, telling a story or carrying forward a habit of care. This use of continuity does not require a claim about consciousness surviving death.

A pet-specific systematic narrative synthesis by Ben Hughes and Beth Lewis Harkin adds a necessary qualification. First published online in September 2022, with its journal issue appearing in 2025, it found that continuing bonds could support bereaved owners but could also intensify grief. The underlying literature was heterogeneous. Its value here is to keep us attentive to the particular person, rather than prescribe remembrance as a universal remedy.[5]

A photograph may offer company today and feel overwhelming tomorrow. Keeping an object, putting it away or changing a ritual can each be a considered response. Our editorial invitation is to ask whether the connection feels welcome, burdensome or mixed, and to allow the answer to change.

Philip Hyland’s January 2026 study brings the seriousness of pet loss into sharper focus. In an online UK sample of 975 adults, it compared grief symptoms following human and pet bereavement. Among 296 respondents who had experienced both kinds of loss, 62 identified their pet’s death as the most distressing. The analysis also found comparable measurement of prolonged-grief symptoms across the two kinds of bereavement.[6]

This was a quota-sampled survey using self-report measures, not clinician-confirmed diagnoses. Its application of the symptom framework to pet loss does not itself change diagnostic criteria. It supports taking such grief seriously without treating every painful loss as a disorder.[6]

We might remember an animal by making another animal’s life gentler. We might plant something, write down a favourite memory or simply leave the basket where it is for a while. These are invitations, not a schedule for grieving. There need be no test of whether someone has remembered correctly.

For readers seeking support, Blue Cross offers a dedicated pet-loss service in the UK. Its website provides current options and availability.[7] Persistent distress or experiences that feel frightening are also reasons to seek support from a qualified professional.

6. The Animals Who Remain

Loss can leave another animal in the household as well as a grieving human. Brittany Greene and Jennifer Vonk’s 2024 study surveyed 412 caregivers about 452 surviving cats after another household animal had died. Caregivers reported changes including reduced eating, sleeping and playing. The cats’ prior relationships with the deceased animals were associated with reported responses.[8]

These are caregiver assessments, not direct access to feline experience. The study leaves open how much the changes reflect grief, separation distress, altered routines or caregivers’ own interpretations. It concerns surviving animals’ behaviour after a companion’s loss; it does not test after-death communication.[8]

For this essay, the practical question widens: who else has had their world changed? Attending to the animals who remain can be part of remembrance. We need not settle exactly how another species understands death before making its needs part of our attention.

7. From Moving Accounts to Better Questions

AkashicNET could develop a stronger research proposal from these sources. The following is our suggestion, not a method already tested by the cited papers.

For end-of-life behaviour, a prospective veterinary collaboration could define the observations in advance. Records would distinguish an animal’s baseline condition from later changes, with treatment and timing documented. Where appropriate and consented, independent reviewers could assess recordings without being told the family’s interpretation.

For bereavement experiences, recruitment could include people whether or not they report unusual events. Participants could keep dated records and distinguish waking experiences from dreams. Where several witnesses are involved, each could provide an account before discussing it with others.

The design would need to specify which question each measure addresses. A study of comfort and meaning needs different outcomes from a study claiming information unavailable through ordinary means. Clear predictions and a plan for reporting null findings would help prevent an interesting observation from quietly becoming a different claim.

These proposals would still have limits. Better documentation would not automatically decide between every explanation. It would, however, give later readers a clearer account of what happened, what was inferred and what remains uncertain.

8. Room for Love, Room for Uncertainty

The invitation of HIERATIC016C1 is to let compassion and inquiry sit at the same table. We can listen to an account without promising that we know its cause. We can examine a claim without asking the person who made it to surrender the meaning it holds.

For the larger Book II journey, this companion stays close to grief and care. HIERATIC017 can take up the further questions of afterlife, reincarnation and continuity. The animal reports offer material for those questions, while leaving the survival question unresolved.

We can remember the life that was shared, care for the life still here and leave our largest questions open.