How to help a dog in mourning
While extremely long periods of grieving aren’t normal in dogs, simply showing patience and understanding to a pet in mourning can help an anguished dog cope, suggests anthropologist and author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Show your pet a little patience, human emotions and behaviors can also feed in to the dog’s mood or behavior, suggests Dr. Pachel. “It’s a natural human tendency to want to console, to comfort, to soothe, to nurture, yet it is possible to feed in to the negative emotional process,” Dr. Pachel warns. For instance, “If the dog is reluctant to eat and then gets more attention for sitting by the bowl rather than eating that’s a great way to create a picky eater, at that point.”
Maintaining a normal routine for your pet, such as maintaining a familiar eating time or playtime, is the best way to help with the transitional process. Take a tip from animals that live in the wild. They don’t have as much time to grieve as domesticated animals, “they have to move on pretty quickly, to suck it up and keep going, just like some of us must do,” Thomas says. “This doesn’t mean that grief isn’t still with them, just that they can’t do much about it.”
In the case of an extremely depressed dog, you can also add more playtime to your dog’s normal routine to raise serotonin levels, which may have a positive impact on your dog’s behavior. Read Cesar’s ideas on how to engage in thoughtful playtime with your dog.
source
