When a pet dies, grief doesn’t arrive alone. It brings with it an awkward entourage: embarrassment, self-consciousness, the creeping suspicion that our sorrow might look disproportionate or self indulgent. So we lower our voices when we speak of our loss. We apologise for being ‘silly’. We add the expected caveat: I know it’s not the same as losing a person.

But the truth resists such polite disclaimers: when a pet dies, the pain can be at least as sharp as that of any human bereavement. In a new study of 975 British adults, among those who had lost both a pet and a person close to them, more than one in five said the death of their pet was the most distressing loss they had ever experienced.

The researchers suggest that medical guidelines on extreme grief need to catch up with this reality. People mourning pets can develop prolonged grief disorder – a state of enduring anguish that doesn’t politely fade after a few weeks. For some, the loss reverberates through months or even years, echoing with an intensity comparable to losing a partner or family member.

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