Pet Grief Is Real Grief, a New Study Finds

We read the paper, and here is what it actually says.

Published in PLOS ONE on January 14, 2026, the study by Philip Hyland of Maynooth University surveyed a nationally representative sample of 975 adults in the United Kingdom about their experiences of loss (Hyland et al., PLOS ONE 2026). Fiona Brook of Birmingham City University walked through the findings for a general audience in a plain-language write-up.

Two findings are worth holding onto. First, among people who had lost both a pet and a person, 21% — roughly one in five — said the pet’s death was harder to bear. Read that carefully: it is not a claim that losing a pet is worse than losing a person. It is a measurement, taken only among people who have lived through both, of which loss hit harder. For some, it was the animal.

Second, and more clinically grounded: about 7.5% of people who had lost a pet met the criteria for prolonged grief disorder — a recognized condition, not ordinary sadness. That rate sits squarely among human losses. In the same study, the conditional rate was 11.2% after a parent’s death, 8.9% after a sibling’s, and 7.8% after a close friend’s. Pet loss landed at 7.5%, just below a close friend. People who had lost a pet were also 27% more likely to show prolonged-grief symptoms than those who hadn’t.

The honest read here is not “rank your losses.” It is that the grief many people feel over an animal is real grief — measurable, sometimes clinical, and on the same map as the people we lose. If you have felt that and wondered whether you were overreacting, the data says you were not.

One limit, stated plainly: this is a single UK sample. The pattern needs replication elsewhere before anyone treats the exact numbers as settled.