Grief has a way of clearing a room. Not at first. At first people show up with casseroles and hugs and their best sad faces. But loss is heavy and it does not lift on anyone’s schedule, and after a few weeks the texts thin out, the visits stop, and the people who love you start, gently, to miss the version of you that wasn’t sad. You are still carrying the weight. They have quietly set theirs down.
Into that silence walks the dog. Or the cat, or, it turns out, the horse or the goat or the pig. And according to a striking piece of research, the animal does the job better than almost anyone with a human face.
The rankings are brutal for our species
A 2021 study published in the journal PLOS ONE asked grieving people a simple question: who gave you comfort, and how satisfied were you with it? Of 248 participants, 89 percent of those who leaned on a pet or other animal said they were mostly or extremely satisfied with the support they got. Nothing else came close. Online grief groups landed a distant second at 67 percent. Counselors and therapists ranked third. In-person grief groups came fourth. Friends managed only 52 percent. Family came in dead last, at 40 percent.
Read that order again, because it stings. The people we would expect to hold us, our friends and our relatives, scored lowest. The animal that cannot say a single word scored highest.
The study’s lead author, Joanne Cacciatore, a professor of social work at Arizona State University who has spent her career with the bereaved, was not surprised. In her interviews, grievers described people physically turning away when they started to cry, or steering them toward a distraction. Animals did the opposite. They stayed.
It’s not magic. It’s that pets don’t flinch.
Here is the uncomfortable heart of it. Pets are not better at grief because they possess some mystical healing power. They are better because they do the one thing frightened humans cannot: they stay in the room without trying to fix anything.
“People rush to make grief smaller, because grief frightens them,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “We offer advice, we change the subject, we hint that it’s time to move on. A dog does none of that. A dog just puts its head in your lap and stays, with no agenda and no expiration date, and that steady, non-judgmental presence is exactly what a grieving nervous system is starving for.”
That is the part worth stealing. When a griever cries, an animal does not need the crying to stop. It does not treat sorrow as a problem to be solved or a mood to be corrected. It simply keeps company. Cacciatore’s work suggests that the lesson for the rest of us is almost embarrassingly plain: show up, stay, and resist the urge to talk someone out of their pain.
The healing shows up in the body, too
This is not just a story people tell themselves. The measurable effects of animal comfort keep turning up in labs. A separate 2022 PLOS ONE study ran the idea through a hospital: across a sample of more than 200 people, patients who got a brief ten-minute therapy-dog visit in the emergency department came away hurting noticeably less than those given only the usual care. Another study, in the journal Emotion, found that after a stressful task, time with a dog lifted people’s moods and eased their anxiety more effectively than coloring or simply sitting and waiting.
And the comfort is not a dog-and-cat monopoly. In Cacciatore’s research, grievers also found real solace in horses, goats, and pigs. A follow-up study she authored looked at what happened when people spent time with rescued animals on a care farm and learned about those animals’ own histories of hardship, and it found the connection ran both ways.
One detail from the 2021 study lingers: a parent who had lost a child described talking to their dog on walks about the child, precisely because the dog could only listen. No advice. No flinch. Just a warm body that had nowhere else to be.
What’s new since this was written
The science of pets and mental health has become a formal field, not just a feel-good headline. In early 2025, the Human Animal Bond Research Institute released a report on the role of companion animals in improving mental health, pulling together data and best practices for clinicians and policymakers. Later that year, the same institute teamed up with Mental Health America to launch an online Pets and Mental Health Resource Center, a sign that the medical world is taking the connection seriously enough to build tools around it.
Grief specifically is getting more attention, too. A 2025 scoping review gathered the growing body of research on what pet owners go through when they lose an animal, and a 2024 study of people fostering animals for shelters found that the caregiving itself, the companionship and affection of a temporary animal, appeared to be good for the humans doing it. The throughline of all of it echoes that original finding: animals help, measurably, and often when people cannot.
If you are the one grieving right now, none of this is a suggestion to face it alone with only a pet for company. Human support done well matters enormously, and a good grief counselor or support line can be a lifeline. This is a hard topic, and if you are struggling, reaching out to a professional or a trusted person is worth doing. But if you have ever whispered something into your dog’s fur that you couldn’t say out loud to anyone else, the research is on your side. That was real, and it helped.
References
- Cacciatore, J., et al. “A tale of two companions: A qualitative and quantitative study of animal companionship and grief.” PLOS ONE, 2021. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250088
- “Effects of therapy dogs on the pain of emergency department patients.” PLOS ONE, 2022. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
- Human Animal Bond Research Institute. “The Role of Companion Animals for Improved Mental Health.” 2025. https://habri.org/pressroom/20250211
- Human Animal Bond Research Institute and Mental Health America. “Pets and Mental Health Resource Center.” 2025. https://habri.org/pressroom/20251022
- Alves, A. F. R., and Scorsolini-Comin, F. “Grief for the Loss of a Pet: A Scoping Review.” 2025. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00221678251355010
