Evidence for grief-like responses in farm animals including cattle, pigs and sheep challenges assumptions about the inner lives of species routinely farmed for food.
The evidence for grief-like responses in farm animals provides powerful counter-evidence to assumptions that these species have limited emotional lives. When a cow calls for her calf for days after separation, when a pig loses interest in food after a herd mate is removed, when a sheep returns to investigate the location where a companion died, these animals are expressing responses that parallel human grief functionally and neurologically. The welfare implications of this evidence are profound: routine practices in commercial farming — calf separation, group disruption, abrupt removal of herd members — cause suffering that goes far beyond immediate physical stress.