How Animals Grieve by Barbara J. King Read Free Book Online Page A

blur of motion, some moving clockwise, others counterclockwise. “Trotting, wheeling, kicking, galloping hoofed chaos,” Helling recalls. She is certain that no predator, or person, could have breached that moving circle. Could the protective intent of this horse circle suggest a new possibility in relation to the geldings who surrounded Storm Warning? Perhaps they had intuited a connection between Storm and the mound that had appeared in their field, and by encircling it they meant to protect that spot and thus Storm himself. Could the horses somehow have thought that Storm might reappear? Or were they in fact mourning him?
    The fact of the horse circle cannot in itself answer the question of what went on in Storm’s companions’ minds. But the anecdote does help to refute what some naysayers insist: that what we interpret as horse grief must instead express a feeling of vulnerability caused by separation from the herd. On this skeptical view, “grief” is an overstated claim, because the horses are only demonstrating the anxiety that besets a survivor in a herd-oriented species. Yet this “herd mentality” explanation doesn’t match up with what happened after Storm died. The surviving horses placed themselves in a specific configuration and expressed no agitation through their body language. Their group was intact, save one; they had no reason to feel vulnerable. Even though we cannot intuit precisely what the horses may have been feeling, it’s clear enough that something unusual was going on, beyond a concern for the self.
    Responding to an article on horse grief by Kenneth Marcella in
Thoroughbred Times
, a reader described the events that unfolded after her thoroughbred filly lost her companion. This other horse, Silver, had died suddenly, and his body was visible to the filly. While Silver was buried, she was turned into a separate field. When she later returned to the field they had shared, she stationed herself on top of the grave and pawed the ground. Indifferent to offers of food and companionship, coming in at night only when forced to do so, she persisted in her behavior for almost two weeks.
    Can the science of horse behavior help us understand this reaction? In his article, Marcella observes that an increase in horse longevity in the last fifteen years means that “equine buddies” now spend significantly longer periods of time together. Some horses who lose longtime friends may fall into outright depression. This is what happened with Tony and Pops, two workhorses who had known each in years past and met again at the time of their retirement. Once they rediscovered each other, these two were rarely apart. After Pops died, Tony lost weight, stopped interacting with other horses, and became lethargic enough that he lost muscle. His arthritis flared up.
    In the horse world, this situation is often diagnosed as depression and treated accordingly, with anything from extra attention from human companions to doses of Valium. For horses, depression may exacerbate physical ailments such as colic, so breaking the cycle of mourning, falling sick, and becoming more depressed is potentially urgent. The introduction of a new companion may help, just as we have seen with other animals. One
Thoroughbred Times
reader told of her horse, who mourned when his pasturemate of twenty-three years died. For two weeks he stood in a spot, under a favorite tree, that he had often shared with his friend. He would not eat. Only when a mare died during foaling, and he began to care for her orphan, did his behavior turn around.
    I’ve next to no personal experience with horses, beyond admiring their grace and intelligence—though I did, during a fourth-grade class outing, fall off a horse and still retain a memory of that long trip to the ground. Just as I remain impressed with the sheer size and power of horses, I have come to admire many horse people’s embrace of horse grief and their efforts to ease it. Marcella even