Pet Grief: When is Non-Human Life Grievable?

Abstract

This study explores how pet owners grieve their pets and view their pets' transience. Drawing on Butler's notion of the differential allocation of grievability, I have analysed interviews with eighteen pet owners. Butler argues that grievability is made possible by a normative framework which allows for some human or humanlike lives to be grieved, while other lives are rendered ‘lose-able’. All the interviewed pet owners say that they are capable of grieving a non-human animal, but analysis suggests that they make their pets grievable and ungrievable by turns. I argue that by maintaining this ambivalence, the interviewees negotiate pets' inclusion in a human moral community while simultaneously defending human exceptionalism. The article concludes with a discussion of pet grief as a potentially destabilizing emotion. I suggest that grieving beings on the border between grievable human and lose-able animal – ‘werewolves’ according to Giorgio Agamben – may be a powerful way of challenging normative frameworks which arbitrarily render some human and non-human lives lose-able.

Introduction

Grief for pets is a widespread phenomenon that is mediated by societal and technical practices such as counselling services, websites, books and funeral services (Kenney, 2004; Weisman, 1991). Still, research suggests that there is a taboo against grieving lost pets openly. Scholars have argued that the marginalization of pet grief is caused by owners' fear of social sanctions (Stephens and Hill, 1996), by the lack of common rituals in Western culture for pets who pass away (Woods, 2000) and by the widespread treatment of pets as human substitutes who are not appreciated for their species-specific characteristics (Morley and Fook, 2005). Accordingly, Stewart et al. (1989) have termed pet loss ‘disenfranchised bereavement’. The present article argues that to understand how we can come to grieve beings not generally regarded as grievable, sociology must ask questions about who is included in the very notion of ‘we’. Grieving an individual non-human animal challenges non-human animals' general status as material resources, non-social objects and replaceable members of a species or of the very vague category of ‘animals’ (Derrida, 2008; Shapiro, 1989; Smith, 2005).

This study explores how pet owners grieve their pets and view their pets' transience. It draws on interviews with eighteen pet owners to understand how pet owners negotiate their pets' grievability during talk about pet loss. To analyse the interviews, I draw on Judith Butler's (2004, 2009) conceptualization of grief. Butler argues that grief has specific characteristics and that norms restrict the allocation of grievability by impeding the ascription of one or more of these characteristics. First, the grieved being is considered irreplaceable. Second, grief is transformative and takes unpredictable expressions. Third, the loss of a person is always the loss of a body, and therefore, grief is a bodily experience. My analysis traces these three characteristics of grief in pet owners' accounts to see how and when they are mobilized and contested. My findings suggest that although the pet owners say that they are capable of grieving a non-human animal, they also frame their pets as ungrievable in various ways by making use of the potential for ambivalence in these three characteristics of grief.

To make sense of pet grief as a sociological phenomenon, I first discuss pets' social status and review previous research on pet loss. Butler's work is particularly useful for understanding pet grief, so in the next section, I review this work in detail. To study how pet owners negotiate grief I use open-ended interviews; the following section explains my methodology in eliciting these interviews. In the succeeding section I present an analysis of the interviewees' accounts. I draw the conclusion that pet owners make their pets grievable and ungrievable by turns to be able to grieve them while simultaneously keeping the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal’ separate. The human/animal dichotomy is discursively produced and negotiated in diverse contexts and in many cases the traditional version of the dichotomy turn out to be deficient when applied in a specific context (see eg Latimer and Birke, 2009; Parry, 2010). In the particular case of pet grief, the interpersonal implications of grief collide with the hierarchical dichotomization between humans and other animals, revealing tensions inherent to the human/animal binary. I end the article by merging Butler's (2009: 75) notion of ‘partially eclipsed deaths’ with Agamben's (1998) discussion of the werewolf myth. By doing so, I suggest that to demand recognition for one's grief for a ‘werewolf’, a being on the border between human and animal, may destabilize normative frameworks that arbitrarily render some lives – both human and non-human – ‘lose-able’ (see Butler, 2009: 31).

Background and previous research

Scholars have suggested that pets' popularity today stems from the social isolation and the marginalization of nature that characterizes contemporary Western society (Berger, 1980; Franklin, 1999). But we cannot fully understand the social significance of pet grief if we reduce it to a symptom of the conditions of late modernity. Regardless of the sociological reasons for pets' popularity, pet owners often form strong bonds to their pets and relate to them as persons. We can better understand pet grief if we approach it as an integral part of both personal identity and the wider matter of humans' self-understanding in relation to the exclusion of ‘the animal’.

In the Western context, the concept of humanity has traditionally rested on the exclusion of non-human animals and human ‘others’ who have been regarded as soulless machines by those privileged with human status (Agamben, 2004; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). Even though individual pets are often grieved deeply, non-human animals are today protected under the law as property rather than as individuals with rights of their own (Francione, 2000). Pets thus ‘exist in the liminal position between the socially constructed categories of person/being and that of nonperson/object’ (Sanders, 1995: 209), and in the tension between disposable commodity and beloved companion (Beverland et al., 2008). Furthermore, pets are appreciated for their ‘animal’ characteristics but are simultaneously subjected to ‘civilizing’ practices with the aim to turn them into ‘little humans’: breeding, disciplining, neutering and spaying (Fox, 2006). This ambivalent status of pets places them on the border between nature and culture, as simultaneously included in and excluded from a human moral community. Accordingly, Shell (1986: 137) states that ‘[p]ets stand at the intersection of kin and kind’. Pets lack consanguinity but are often considered ‘family’, and they are in many ways treated as humans even though they belong to the category of animals. Extending Shell's argument to the loss of a pet leads us to see that losing a pet may emphasize the pet's impact on the owner, but grieving the pet openly becomes a challenge to human exceptionalism.

The word ‘pet’ itself can be considered derogatory because it reduces non-human animals to passive objects existing for humans' amusement (Arluke and Sanders, 1996: 171). Yet, the notion of ‘companion animal’ is also problematic because it risks obscuring the paradoxical status of the category's members. ‘Companion’ neglects the fact that humans are generally regarded as owners of their non-human companions, and ‘animal’ cements humans' position as an exception from this category (see Haraway, 2003, for further discussion). I use the terms ‘pet’ and ‘pet owner’ to emphasize the problematic power dynamic those concepts entail (see also Fudge, 2008; Tuan, 1984), and to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2011) that the notion of ‘pet grief’ causes.

Previous research on pet grief has not explored the challenge that pet grief poses to a collective ‘human’ identity. Instead, most scholarship treats pet grief as a psychological problem. Consequently, research aimed to improve veterinarians' talk with grieving clients (Dickinson et al., 2010; Quackenbush, 1984), to measure the psychological impact of pet loss (Field et al., 2009; Gage and Holcomb, 1991; Wrobel and Dye, 2003), to compare the psychological effects of human loss and pet loss (Gerwolls and Labott, 1994) and to compare and evaluate methods of counselling bereaved pet owners (Weisman, 1991). Only a handful of researchers have approached pet grief as a sociological phenomenon. Stephens and Hill (1996), for example, showed that many pet owners try to give meaning to their pets' demise and that when pets pass away, owners emphasize the role that their pets played in their lives. Chur-Hansen et al. (2011) suggest from empirical evidence that pet owners often lack guidelines for how to grieve their pets, but nevertheless often seek to manifest their grief in a memorial of some sort. Hirschman (1994: 624) has noted that there seems to be a ‘cultural hierarchy’ of pets: mammal species are often grieved similarly to humans, while owners show little affection towards, for example, fish, which many see as ‘not really alive’ in the first place. These studies contribute to the understanding of pet grief as a social phenomenon, but their primary aim is to suggest improvements in practices connected with pet loss (such as counselling, veterinarians' communication and cremation services) rather than to help construct a coherent theoretical conceptualization of the phenomenon.

Pet grief and the differential allocation of grievability

This study explores pet grief as a relational phenomenon that is played out in the tension between the grieving person, the pet and the conflicting discourses that frame their relationship. Butler's conceptualization of grief is useful for this analysis in two ways. First, in contrast to psychological studies of pet grief, Butler's (2004, 2009) relational view of grief helps explain why some lives in some contexts are grieved while others are regarded as ungrievable, substitutable and ‘lose-able’. Butler (2004: xiv) speaks of this as a ‘differential allocation of grievability’. She uses the term ‘framing’; a being is framed as grievable when it is given a certain position in relation to the wider norms that circumscribe individual and collective identity (see, eg, Butler, 2009: 75). We consider those who are framed as grievable to be included in our moral community – a shared sense of ‘we’ – whereas life that is framed as ungrievable and thus ‘lose-able’ is excluded from that community (Butler, 2004, 2009). The second aspect of Butler's conceptualization that makes it useful is the challenge it presents to anthropocentric understandings of grief. Butler suggests that the normative framework that makes grievability possible is intimately connected to the notion of human identity – it ‘operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human’ (Butler, 2004: xiv; see also 1993, 2009). Butler herself has characterized this perspective as ‘a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable’ (Antonello and Farneti, 2009; see also Stanescu, 2012). By using Butler's framework to analyse how pet owners allocate grievability to their pets, we may understand how non-human life can become grievable, even if grievability is first and foremost reserved for ‘normatively human’ subjects.

Butler's theoretical account of grief is best understood in terms of three central concepts. First, the grieved always appears as impossible to substitute, as irreplaceable, to the grieving person: grieving persons have lost a specific relationship which made them into who they are (Butler, 2004). For Butler (2009), grief is a phenomenon of interdependence: it reminds us that our personal identities depend on our interactions with others, and that our own status as grievable is a prerequisite for our existence as subjects. A griever has not lost an isolated individual, but a relationship, or a ‘relationality’, that cannot be reduced to its related parts because it precedes the related individuals (Butler, 2004: 22). Accordingly, accounts of grief may reference this interdependence and may particularly emphasize the irreplaceability of the grieved one.

Second, the expression that grief takes is always to some extent unpredictable because the relationalities that we are a part of are complex and opaque (Butler, 2004). Butler (2004) points out that grieving persons may discover aspects of themselves which they did not know existed, and for that reason, loss has a ‘transformative effect’. Any attempt to stay the same after losing someone important is in vain because the relationality is no longer the same. For these reasons, accounts of grief are often characterized by a lack of words or accurate descriptions, as well as by expressions of astonishment.

Third, a grievable loss is always embodied; loss and grief draws the attention of grieving persons to themselves and their lost ones as precarious bodies, and loss is therefore always a bodily experience (Butler, 2004, 2009). For Butler (2009; cf. Lévinas, 1999), existence is bound up with precariousness. We are precarious socially and emotionally because our identities are porous and dependent on others. We are precarious physically because we all share a bodily vulnerability from birth; quite literally our bodies are in the hands of others – ‘not quite ever only our own’ (Butler, 2004: 26). For that reason, in accounts of grief, one should be able to find references to bodies, physical sensation and vulnerability.

Irreplaceability, unpredictability and embodied loss are three different discourses which, when they are mobilized, frame someone as grievable. By contrast, to make someone lose-able – human or other – certain discourses must be in place: the being must be framed as replaceable, the consequences of its loss must be framed as predictable and non-transformative, and the loss must not be framed as accentuating a common state of precariousness. Disavowing deeper emotional bonds between humans and other animals limits the possibility for non-human life to be recognized as sentient and grievable, and is thus also a way to maintain an exclusively human moral community (Butler, 2004). In contrast, when people grieve their pets, they challenge not only the differential allocation of grievability, but also the status of the ideal, human subject of grief. As Butler (2009: 75) points out, ‘there are deaths that are partially eclipsed and partially marked, and that instability may well activate the frame, making the frame itself unstable’. By shedding light on some of these partially eclipsed deaths, the present article exposes the normative frameworks that decide who is framed as grievable and who counts as kin.

In spite of Butler's emphasis on the connection between grievability and humanity, all of the interviewees except two said that they had grieved a non-human animal, and all of them said that they would be able to do so. Following Butler, pets, who belong to the category ‘animal’, may thus have the potential to destabilize the human/animal dichotomy when they are grieved. Adding to Sanders' (1995) view of pets as liminal persons, I argue that when liminal persons are lost, they are subject to ‘liminal grief’. By taking this liminality into account, Butler's concept of grievability provides the tools that enable an understanding of how non-human life can become grievable within a normative anthropocentric framework. In light of the destabilizing potential of pet grief, asking when non-human life is grievable entails asking what challenges this kind of grief puts to the ideal, human subject of grief, and an anthropocentric sense of ‘we’. While the former question is the focus of my analysis, I return to the latter question in the concluding discussion.

Methodological reflections

The data for this study consist of recorded and transcribed semi-structured interviews with eighteen pet owners living in Sweden about pet keeping. One section of the interview concerned loss and grief, and this section is the focus of the present study. The interviews were conducted between 2010 and 2012 and lasted between one and two hours; most of them took place in the interviewees' homes. I used my personal network and pet owners' organizations to obtain recommendations for suitable interviewees. To get a variety of perspectives on pet keeping, I strove for a sample that included a variety of humans and other animals. As a result, interviewees varied by sex (eleven women and seven men), relationship status (six were single, nine had children), age (spanned between 20 and 70, half of the sample were younger than 40), location (seven lived in rural areas), occupation and education (twelve had qualified employment), and country of birth (three were born outside Sweden). Eleven of the interviewees owned dogs, seven owned cats, and two owned birds. The sample also included a fish owner, a rat owner, and an owner of snakes and lizards. The project has been approved by the regional ethical review board in Uppsala (no. 2010/187). While I conducted the interviews in Swedish, I have translated the quoted excerpts into English.

I asked the interviewees to let their pets be present during the interviews in order to minimize the risk of reducing the discussed sentient beings to members of a homogeneous category (see Haraway, 2008). Several of the interviewees started to speak with their pets when we touched upon the subject of loss. I also noticed that I weighed my words more carefully with the pets present when talking about loss and grief. This indicates that having the pets present helped me and the interviewees to focus on the relation between the owners and their pets rather than hypothetical cases or abstract issues.

In the analysis that follows, I conceptualize Butler's three aspects of grief as three discourses that pet owners rely on when making sense of pet loss. Accordingly, the analysis will emphasize these discourses, rather than treating the accounts of each interviewee separately. According to Butler (2009), patterns of discursive reproduction construct both ethical and epistemological ‘normative frameworks’. While all interaction relies on existing normative frameworks, each instance of language use draws on different discourses and is thus only an imperfect repetition of the norm, with the potential to disrupt and renegotiate normative frameworks (Butler, 2009). Complex ethical issues are thus not structured by a single and coherent normative framework; instead, such matters often take the form of a dilemma, providing language users with the possibility of arguing both in favour of and against particular positions (Billig et al., 1988). When reading the transcribed interviews through the lens of Butler's theory of grief, I discovered that while the interviewees did mobilize all three aspects of her conceptualization of grief, they also conditioned them in various ways and thus maintained their pets' ambivalent status.

Analysis

In this section, I will consider the three central aspects of Butler's conceptualization of grief – irreplaceability, unpredictability and embodied loss – as discourses with potential for ambivalence which pet owners draw on to frame their pets as grievable. Most of the interviewees who regarded their pets as grievable had cats or dogs, but a rat owner grieved her rats, an owner of five birds grieved his demised birds, and the farmer mourned her lost horses. The analysis ends with a section about pets framed as ungrievable.

Irreplaceability

The first aspect of Butler's conceptualization of grief is irreplaceability: the grieved always appears as irreplaceable to the grieving person. In the interviews, the interdependence of pet owners and pets was a recurring topic. One of the most tangible ways that interviewees emphasized their pets' irreplaceability was by describing them as unique ‘individuals’, ‘persons’ or ‘personalities’ who played a special role in the life of the owner (see also Beverland et al., 2008; Sanders, 1993). A woman volunteering at a cat shelter who owned four cats explained that ‘you can never replace an individual with another individual, it doesn't work that way’. In turn, a man who owned two dogs and worked full time as a hunting dog trainer said that he remembered each of his lost dogs vividly. He stated that each one had a unique ‘personality’, and added a contrasting example: ‘I can't remember all the girlfriends I've had, even though I've told them that I love them.’ A large-scale kennel owner who had thirty dogs at home at the time of my visit – and considered eighteen of them her own – pointed out that even though she regularly sold dogs, she would never treat them as replaceable consumer objects. She stated that she deeply grieved each dog she lost and emphasized that ‘when you no longer grieve your animals, then you shouldn't keep animals at all’.

In relation to the subject of loss and grief, many interviewees pointed out that pets are often with their owners from kennel to grave. Because the interviewees knew that they would probably outlive their pets, many of them had already chosen a burial place for the pets they had at the time of the interview. They planned to bury their pets next to a summerhouse, in a forest, or in their garden; owners chose a burial place that mattered to the owner, the pet, or both. A woman who always had her dog with her – at work, when shopping and when visiting friends – wanted to spread her dog's ashes in the same place that she had spread her father's ashes, ‘underneath our beloved apple tree with a view of the ocean where she loves to lie down’. Some of the interviewees also wanted fellow mourners, such as friends, family, and in a couple of cases other pets, to be with them when they said goodbye to their pets; this desire demonstrated owners' sense of their pets' impact on the larger context of their families and social networks.

Most interviewees said that they had people around them who understood their need to grieve their deceased pets; several of them added with a smile that they did not spend much time with people who did not appreciate their pets' importance. But while mourning ceremonies may accentuate pets' irreplaceability, owners of grievable pets sometimes resisted the notion of a ceremony. Some chose not to have funerals because they thought of such ceremonies as anthropomorphic and ‘selfish’. Others wanted to spread their pets' ashes in the style of a ceremony, without wanting to call it that. A couple of interviewees did not bring home the ashes of their lost pets because they did not want to go through the trouble of deciding what to do with them. Yet others joked about the fact that they grieved their animals, describing themselves as ‘childish’ and ‘so damn sentimental’. Charles and Davies (2008) have noticed how pet owners joke about their relationship with their pets in interview situations and argue that joking is a way to handle pets' ambivalent status. The interviewees' jokes and laughter can thus be read as a way to express that they know that others may disapprove of the interviewees' close bonds with their pets.

The interviewees also challenged their pets' status as irreplaceable; for example, some said that they did not want to live without a pet and planned to get a new one when their present pet passed away. They spoke about this in terms of what could be labelled ‘emotional timing’: getting another pet too soon after the previous one had passed away would risk belittling the lost pet's memory. This complexity can be understood in relation to Donna Haraway's (2003) concept of ‘significant otherness’: just as pet owners' identities are relationally constituted by their individual pets, they are also relationally constituted by the breeds and species integral to their way of life. Pets and owners provide each other with significant otherness, and ‘relations of significant otherness transform those who relate and the worlds they live in’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012: 207). Pet owners can thus both grieve the loss of their individual pet and the loss of a category and the significant otherness it entails. Keeping several pets was one way of avoiding petlessness as well as the risks associated with an early replacement. A few also kept their lost pets' offspring as a way to deal with the pet's short life cycle by introducing a continuous cycle of generations. The large-scale kennel owner said regarding the dogs she had lost throughout the years: ‘I have their offspring or siblings or parents, so they remain in my heart forever. So there will be a hell of a pack meeting me when I pass over to the other side.’

One last way by which owners emphasized their pets' irreplaceability was when they compared the loss of a pet to the loss of a human. In fact, in the interviews at large, comparisons between humans and other animals were exceptionally frequent in discussions of grief (see also Charles and Davies, 2008; Gage and Holcomb, 1991; Planchon et al., 2002). Many interviewees said that losing a pet feels ‘as if’ one had lost a human friend, a family member, or a relative. The phrase ‘as if’ is crucial: it points to an analogy rather than a complete identification. These references to ‘as-if emotions’ can be read as a way for pet owners to handle the double framing of the pet as simultaneously replaceable and irreplaceable. Only one dog owner – an educated dog trainer and a professional dog walker – explicitly pointed out that she did not want to grieve her dogs in a ‘too-human’ way, making explicit the ir/replaceability ambivalence. She was afraid that a general levelling of dogs with humans would make people stop treating dogs as dogs, and dogs would thereby not be taught how to coexist with humans.

To sum up, this section describes the ambivalent use of the irreplaceability discourse. On the one hand, pet owners emphasized their pets' irreplaceability by describing them as persons, by planning mourning ceremonies and by comparing their loss with human loss. On the other hand, pet owners balanced these descriptions by joking about them, by rejecting burial ceremonies for their pets and by considering replacing their pets to fill the void that they would leave in passing away.

Unpredictability

Unpredictability is the second aspect of Butler's conceptualization of grief. As Butler points out, the power of grief is always somewhat unpredictable and so has a ‘transformative effect’: grieving persons cannot definitely know who they will go on being after the loss of the grieved. One way that interviewees framed pet grief as unpredictable was by saying that they needed to adjust their lives to deal with the grief that they felt when losing a pet, rather than the other way around. Several owners also stated that they simply could not tell how they would feel or react next time they lost a pet, yet they were certain that they did not want others to interfere with their grieving process or to chastise them for grieving a pet ‘too long’. Even though pet grief was described as stressful, painful and unpredictable, the interviewees did not want to be protected from grief. Two of the interviewees had childhood memories of their fathers trying to hide the death of their family dogs. Both said that their grief would have been easier to deal with if their fathers had been straight with them. A few interviewees also spoke of the shock of having an animal that suddenly becomes fatally ill, and said that this experience forced them to radically reconsider both their relationship to their pet and their life situation (see also Stephens and Hill, 1996).

Nevertheless, as the previous section shows, many pet owners plan for their pet's death. Planning far in advance for a pet's demise can be considered a way of trying to curb the unpredictable power of pet grief. A man who ran a small-scale kennel with his wife explained that the two of them keep returning to this subject:

I realize that I can't take [the dogs] with me throughout my life. Let's say that you get to live an average of eighty years or something like that. There will be a great many dogs who will cross your path if you go on having dogs. […] I think, now that [my oldest dog] is going on seven, […] in a few years she may be gone and that could actually be quite natural.

Similarly, several interviewees said that their pets' relatively short life span is not merely an isolated drawback of pet keeping, but structures the whole relationship and forces owners to value the short time they have with their pets. Several of the interviewees pointed out that a pet's short life span can make pet loss exceptionally painful – pets always pass away too soon. The rat owner, who framed her rat as grievable, said that whether you grieved someone was more ‘a matter of personality’ than of the length of the relationship. While interviewees described the short life span of many pets as the worst part of having a pet, pets' limited life span was not only spoken of in unanimously negative terms. The small-scale kennel owner pointed out that he would probably think twice before getting a dog if dogs lived as long as human beings do. The woman who always had her dog with her said that she planned to go out travelling the day her dog passes away. Thus, the relatively short life span of many pets can make their lives and their deaths more manageable in relation to the larger perspective of the owners' life cycle.

While the interviewees acknowledged the power of pet grief and considered it counterproductive to try to control the shock of losing a dear pet, they simultaneously framed pet loss and pet grief as somewhat predictable and manageable. They described loss as a natural part of having a pet; some pointed out that pet owners have responsibility for their pets throughout the pets' lives and sometimes choose the moment of their pets' death. Pet owners' many references to plans and predictions indicate that pet owners draw on the discourse of unpredictability in ambivalent ways to make sense of their pets' transience.

Embodied loss

The third aspect of Butler's conceptualization of grief is embodied loss: we are all precarious, both socially, because we rely on others for our identities, and physically, because we all share a bodily vulnerability. These two aspects of our precariousness are intimately bound up together. The interviewees described a life without pets as both physically and socially empty, and several of them described missing their pets intensely when going away on trips. The painfulness of sudden physical absence in the home was also confirmed by a few interviewees who had given away or sold their pets. These accounts confirmed the notion that pets always inhabit a physical place in the lives of their owners.

Several of the owners have memories of their pets' precariousness at the end of their lives. These accounts often related to the physical senses, with detailed references to, for example, sounds such as the coughs of a sick cat or the bark of a dying dog, or the sensation of having a cat dying in one's arms. As Sanders (1995: 201) points out, non-human animals seldom die an ‘aesthetic death’; seeing a beloved companion passing away can be very painful. Interviewees sometimes connected their pets' bodily precariousness with their own bodily engagement in the relationship. For example, a cat owner said that when she heard her terminally ill cat coughing, her stomach ‘cramped’.

The interviewees repeatedly described how signs of their pets' ageing changed the relationship and made the owners more aware of their pets' limitations. The theme of ageing was especially prominent in reference to older dogs who could no longer go on long walks. Bodily vulnerability was also a recurring theme in discussions of decisions about euthanasia. Interviewees repeatedly described euthanasia as one of a pet owner's responsibilities and as the ‘fair’ thing to do for an old and ill pet. A couple of interviewees explained this standpoint saying that animals cannot conceptualize pain and therefore suffer more intensely than humans do. Several of the interviewees described keeping a suffering animal alive as ‘egoistic’, some added that euthanasia is a natural end to a pet's life. They discussed the ‘perfect moment’ to have a pet euthanized: not ‘too early’, when the pet was still enjoying life, but not ‘too late’ when the pet's life was one of continual suffering. The large-scale kennel owner said, regarding one of her dogs that she knew would have to be euthanized soon: ‘she is deaf, starts to see badly, a bit wiggly on the legs and has a bit of pain when it's cold’. In other words, owners mobilized the pet's body language as a resource to make it morally acceptable to euthanize the pet.

Pet owners saw bodily precariousness as a point of empathic contact. While Butler emphasizes a shared bodily precariousness among humans, the analysis in this study shows that bodily precariousness can create empathy across species borders. Stanescu (2012) has pointed out that Butler's emphasis on precariousness makes her approach anti-anthropocentric. Both humans and other animals share a fundamental social and embodied precariousness, and a philosophy and politics based on precariousness therefore cannot exclude certain lives a priori. Yet, interviewees also described their pets' bodily precariousness as a one-way signal system that tells owners when to consider ending their pets' lives, thus rendering pets as medical objects. This third aspect of pet grief was thus also drawn upon in an ambivalent way: pets' bodily precariousness can create both an empathic connection with and an objectification of the non-human other.

When is non-human life ungrievable?

Some of the non-human animals in the study were not framed as grievable by their owners. To some extent, this study supports Hirschman's (1994) observation that mammals are commonly framed as grievable, while other non-human animals are not. The snake owner, fish owner and the large-scale bird owner stated that they did not grieve their pets, even though they said that they would grieve, or had grieved, a dog or a cat. Species-specific characteristics were recurrently referred to in these accounts: the non-human animals were described as less intelligent, lacking the ability to connect personally with the owner. However, the interviews show that members of the same species can be framed as both grievable and ungrievable. For example, the farmer not only kept bovines and birds for functional purposes, but also cats, who kept the rats away. As with the bovines and birds, she did not think of her cats as pets and did not experience grief when she had a few of the cats euthanized because they had become ‘too many’. Similarly, a comparison of the two bird owners shows that birds can be framed as both grievable and ungrievable. In opposition to the large-scale bird owner, the small-scale bird owner had named his birds, talked about each bird's personality, could in detail describe events from each bird's life, and would honour birds in a ceremonial manner when they passed away.

Pet owners would frame their pets as ungrievable by avoiding one or several of the three characteristics of grief in their accounts. First, the ‘ungrievable pet’ is framed as replaceable. Losing a pet framed as ungrievable could be disappointing due to the time, money and effort the owners put into keeping them, but as the fish owner said: ‘It is more a grief for the project than regret or grief for the individuals.’ Pets framed as ungrievable were sometimes remembered as individuals, but were generally not named, and the owner did not have much to say about these pets' life story. This explains why ungrievable animals are seldom named (see also Hirschman, 1994: 624), and why veterinarians find it easier to euthanize pets whose ‘biography’ they know nothing about (Sanders, 1995). Second, the owners who framed their pets as replaceable did so by describing their loss as not at all transformative. The snake owner, referring to his lizards and snakes, explained that ‘it's always a loss when an animal passes away, but it's not the sad kind of loss’. In this way, owners who framed their pets as ungrievable said that they were not affected emotionally by the loss of their pets. Third, owners framing their pets as ungrievable did not testify to any bodily empathy between pet and owner: these owners did not interact much with their pets and kept them in a cage, an aquarium or a terrarium and thus separated the non-human animals from the human family.

Even though these interviewees did not grieve their animals, they did not simply throw them in the trash or flush them down the toilet when they died. One approach to these dead pets was to eat them (the large-scale bird owner) or feed them to other pets (the fish owner), actions which the owners described in terms of respect for ‘the circle of life’. Holmberg (2008) demonstrates that laboratory-animal caretakers show a ‘feeling for the animal’. This ‘feeling’ includes the practical skill needed to handle laboratory animals, an understanding and admiration for both particular beings and particular species, and, paradoxically, the skill to painlessly euthanize the animals under their care. Pet owners who frame their pets as ungrievable can be understood as demonstrating a similar feeling for the animal: they did not conceive of their pets as persons, but expressed an understanding and respect for their pets.

Discussion

This study's interviewees framed their pets as grievable in relation to each of the three aspects of Butler's conceptualization of grief. Yet, in relation to each theme, the pet owners in the study also distanced themselves from these aspects of grief, framing pet loss as manageable in various ways. First, pet owners who framed their pets as grievable highlighted their pets' unique traits and their special place in the lives of their owners. Nevertheless, the interviewees also discussed the possibility of replacing lost pets, as well as other ways of avoiding petlessness. Second, owners framed their pets as grievable by emphasizing the unpredictable power of the grief that follows the loss of a pet. However, most pet owners outlive their pets, a fact which made the pets' life spans manageable in relation to the owners' longer life plans, and which in turn curbed the unpredictable power of grief. Third, owners emphasized their pets' grievability by relating pet loss and grief to the owners' own sentience and bodily experiences, as well as to their pets' bodily precariousness. Still, they also described their pets as passively communicating bodily signs of ageing that were integral to owners' decisions about euthanasia. The ambivalent character of the pet owners' accounts – their effort to balance the different aspects of grievability – gave the pets a paradoxical status as simultaneously grievable and lose-able. Humans may similarly attempt to make the loss of another human manageable by accounting for the loss in ambivalent ways (see Butler, 2004). Yet, what is characteristic of the present analysis is that this balancing between grievable and ungrievable does not merely concern a few cases; instead, both the empirical material in general and each individual interview have this ambivalent character. Why is it that to make sense of pet loss and grief, pet owners seem compelled to balance between grievable and ungrievable?

Previous research has repeatedly explained this ambivalence with reference to the marginalization of pet grief: pet owners avoid grieving their pets openly because they fear social sanctions, and because there are no social conventions guiding the bereaved owners (Stephens and Hill, 1996; Morley and Fook, 2005; Woods, 2000). This study paints a more complex picture. The interviewees emphasized that they grieve their pets as unique individuals, and that they share the grief with others; only a couple of the interviewees said that they had been criticized when expressing grief for lost pets. Many of them had also developed their own rituals for mourning their pets. Yet, the interviewees chose to first and foremost share their grief with family and close friends, and they seldom related their grief with more general matters about humans' relations to other animals, such as animal rights issues or humans' impact on the environment. Therefore, I argue that pet grief is best understood as liminal grief – as grief simultaneously inside and outside the margin. Shell (1986) sheds light on this liminality: if the treatment of an individual pet as human would be elevated to a general maxim, it would suspend human exceptionalism and expand humans' ethical responsibilities to other species. Yet, pets have to be framed as grievable to be part of an interspecies ‘we’. Indeed, pets' balancing act at the intersection of kin and kind is a matter of life and death.

By showing in detail how pets' lives are framed as both grievable and ungrievable, this study contributes to the understanding of how some non-human animals can be regarded as persons included in a human moral community while human exceptionalism remains intact. This echoes the observation made by Charles and Davies (2008: n.p.) that ‘a post-humanist abandonment of binaries has not permeated the common sense understanding of human-animal relations’. The interviewees drew on anthropomorphic concepts to frame pets as grievable, and made pet loss manageable by turning to a traditional human/animal dichotomy. Furthermore, existing discourses did not seem to allow for grieving pets in a way that would dissolve the problem of simultaneously grieving a being and missing a species. Hence, pet owners would need an exceptional vocabulary to speak of the loss and grief of other-than-human lives – a vocabulary that goes beyond anthropocentric norms, reserved for non-human animals, or maybe even reserved for specific species.

Pet grief thus highlights normative frameworks which render some lives lose-able. Butler (2009: 75) emphasizes that it is especially the partially eclipsed deaths – the deaths in the margins of what is normatively human – that has the power to unsettle frameworks circumscribing grievable life. Staying with the trouble that pet grief causes, rather than turning to anthropocentric ways to deal with pet loss, could thus transform pet grief into a starting point for destabilizing those normative frameworks. I will end this article by suggesting that pet grief can be regarded as a bug in Agamben's ‘anthropological machine’. Agamben (2004) uses this concept to denote the sharp distinction between human and animal and the way it has been, and still is, used to categorize humans as animals in order to justify colonial projects, slavery and war. While human identity includes an exclusion of ‘the animal’, this ‘inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside’ is fundamentally insecure (Agamben, 1998: 18, see also 2004). Thus, the anthropological machine produces ‘bare life’, that is, a state of conditional humanity where one adheres to what is normatively human in fear of losing one's humanity as soon as political interests demand it (Agamben, 1998, 2004; Butler, 2009; Stanescu, 2012).

The anthropological machine constantly gives rise to anomalies. In traditional societies, Agamben (1998: 63) suggests, stories about werewolves, this ‘monstrous hybrid of human and animal’, were used to fathom the paradoxes created by the clear-cut distinction between humans and animals (or ‘political life’ and ‘bare life’). Correspondingly, pets can be regarded as the werewolves of today, only with one crucial difference: while werewolves were feared, many contemporary werewolves are embraced, play an integral role in the life of many humans, and are grieved when they pass away. Could the grief for these partially eclipsed deaths indicate that the cogs of the anthropological machine are slowing down? Finding a way to grieve non-human animals as werewolves – as beings who are both/neither human and/or animal – and demanding acceptance for this liminal grief, would seriously challenge the differential allocation of grievability and the anthropocentric politics of kin and kind. Because, as Butler (2009: 39) points out: ‘Open grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has enormous political potential.’