Within the study of human grief, there is a concept known as ambiguous loss. Coined by clinical psychologist Pauline Boss, it refers to the loss of a person without certainty or resolution – when a death has occurred but the body has not been seen.
- "A bull elephant appeared from the bush. Ambling over to the carcass, the immense creature used his tactile trunk to gently caress the bones of his fallen comrade"
- Do animals have empathy?
Boss suggests that humans may need to see evidence of the transition from life to death in order to obtain closure.
Could this be true of other species?
Keepers of captive animals may need to consider this, as it could be considered cruel to deprive them of their natural grief reactions by preventing them from interacting with a dead body as they would in the wild.
In 2015, a female gorilla at at Frankfurt Zoo carried her dead baby for four days, as zookeepers wanted to “let nature take its course”
