How Animals Grieve

Anthropology professor King (Being with Animals) shares facts, anecdotes, and thoughts about rela-tionships throughout the animal kingdom, from birds that return to each other year after year to a baby elephant that mourns its mother. King defines the conditions necessary for animal love to include ani-mals actively choosing to be together and the suffering of the animal when its partner is no longer pre-sent. When these conditions are met, "Grief blooms because two animals bond, they care, maybe they even love%E2%80%94because of a heart's certainty that another's presence is as necessary as air." King's thoughtful, warmhearted prose will raise awareness and amaze readers as they learn about a dog who rescued his canine companion from being buried alive; a baboon's stages of grief and apparent depres-sion following the loss of her adult daughter; and a dolphin that committed suicide, witnessed by her trainer. Though many observations support the concept of grief among animals, King also discusses situations that do not indicate grief and concludes that, though it may be an individual behavior, its significance is not diminished for those mournful individuals. As for humans, "We grieve with human words but animal bodies and animal gestures and animal movements." (May)