I’ve seen a LOT of animals grieve for their dead.
We don’t have the monopoly on sorrow.
One of the saddest things I ever saw was rabid mother coon who’d brought brought her dying babies to my yard.
They were in severe extremis and didn’t have long.
She kept running up to me and then back to them, ‘patting’ them and putting them back in their ‘pile’.
She’d run off aways and come back, again and again.
I shot her suffering babies and she returned one last time, stood up on her hind legs, spread out her arms and just stood there...waiting.
I shot her, too.
All 3 tests came back rabid yet in her misery, she cared only for her babies and when they were dead, it sure seemed like she just wanted to die, too.
She had not yet become ‘symptomatic’ so I really think she understood what she was doing.
Damn, did I ever cry.
And then I got the shots.
Been offline awhile, but gotcha man. Thanks.
The instinctive care you describe of a mother for her young to the point of her own death is a force of nature stronger than anything.