George waits at the bus stop.
Inset: Amity Hartnett-Campbell.
Posted on 07/29/2003 4:13:56 PM PDT by yankeedame
Ritual breaks dog's heart
By Alex Divine, Rural Reporter July 30, 2003
AT 3.30pm each day George wanders a kilometre from home in search of a miracle.
The loyal jack russell terrier waits at the bus stop where he used to meet his owner Amity Hartnett-Campbell after school, before making the return trip alone.
The sad daily journey has become a ritual for the grieving pet since Amity was killed in a car crash four months ago.
"George has never gone this far from home on his own before," Amity's mother Kim Hartnett said yesterday.
"He must be looking for her.
"Since the accident he's gone off his food. He used to be a little guts.
"He spends most of his time curled up in Amity's lounge.
"He seems to be going through the same things I am."
George's grief follows the terrible accident which claimed the teenager's life on March 29.
Ms Harnett and Amity were driving back from visiting Amity's grandmother in Bathurst when their car skidded off the road and rolled down a 15m embankment.
Ms Hartnett recovered consciousness to discover she had been thrown into the back of the vehicle and the left side of her body was crushed.
Amity was motionless, pinned in the passenger seat, and her mother couldn't reach her.
Ms Hartnett phoned triple 0 on her mobile phone.
"I said 'I've have an accident, and I think my daughter is dead,"' Ms Hartnett recalled.
"The operator said 'stay on the line' but I couldn't stay on because my battery was flat."
More than two hours later ambulance workers found Ms Hartnett collapsed by the side of the road – where she had crawled to try and get help for her daughter.
Amity was found dead at the scene.
Ms Harnett said Amity was different from other teenagers her age.
She said her daughter was mature and would often provide schoolfriends with a shoulder to cry on when the teenagers had problems they didn't to go to their parents with.
"A lot of people depended on her, she could always empathise," Ms Hartnett said.
Ms Harnett said George had adored Amity for the past 10 years.
"George was just a pup when Amity got him," Ms Harnett said.
"He ran to her from a cluster of newborn puppies as soon as he saw her.
"Georgie picked Amity, his heart belongs to her."
People in Wellington who have heard about the grieving George have been touched by the dog's sad tale.
Several have asked if Ms Hartnett would like to give the jack russell another home.
But Ms Harnett's answer is always a firm no.
"He's my baby's dog," Ms Harnett said.
"He's not going anywhere. He gets love in truckloads because we can't give it to her any more."
The Daily Telegraph
Wrong. When my wife and I went out of town our Boston Terrier sulked and refused to eat, cried a lot and walked around with her head drooping. She grieved not because she thought we were dead, she grieved because we were not there.
This argument is full of fallacies. Grieving is an emotion of loss, not related to understanding death. Comprehension of mortality is not an issue here. His person is gone, not available for him, not there. He feels the absence of a pleasant companion and responds to it outwardly. Many animals do this in ways amazingly similar to humans. Can you do better than this submission for your defense?
From this remark I'm beginning to get the impression that your argument is turning on a different definition of grief than the rest of us are using. If you define "grief" as "deep emotional pain following loss," then dogs experience grief as well as humans do. If you define it (as you apparently do) as "deep emotional pain resulting specifically from an awareness that a beloved person is dead," then of course grief would require an understanding of the concept of death.
But as others on this thread have pointed out, having a concept of death is not necessary for anyone, human or animal, to grieve. The child grieves when its parents are divorced, though neither of them are dead. The younger child who doesn't understand death at all grieves when his mother dies. I grieved when I lost a beloved boyfriend, though he was not dead. I grieved when I lost my childhood home, as well. My own mortality or the biological status of the lost person or object was not at issue. The point was that it was gone, and I wanted it, and I experienced a strongly negative emotion as a result of my inability to have it back.
And so it is for the dog who grieves. He knows nothing of death, but he knows that the person or animal he wants for is gone. This is a source of emotional pain. If you don't believe that the canine brain is experiencing something negative, you can sacrifice him, assay some of his serotonergic pathways, and find he has very low levels of some serotonin precursors relative to the normal animal. The same biochemical phenomenon takes place in humans who are depressed. Why Prozac works.
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Yes they do.
Right!(Although I would change feels to senses).He is also waiting for his hugs and his treats. But I contend that this is a far cry from grieving which is a human emotion most often associated with a loss through death (as this story implies).And through thousands of years of domestication, training and an ability to "read" our emotions, it knows what types of behavior it displays will most likely get him more.
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