Can animals have their hearts broken too?

Your cat (probably) isn’t navigating a situationship, but they’re no stranger to heartache.

You thought you were birds of a feather, but it was all just a wild goose chase. When it came to intimacy, you were doing the lion’s share, whilst they were a fish out of water. Commitment was always the elephant in the room; they were just horsing around. Perhaps you were simply barking up the wrong tree.

Tortured animal idioms aside, there will be many of us this month spending Valentine’s Day alone. To be unlucky in love, especially through no fault of your own, is a wretched feeling. Heartbreak will leave you as sick as a dog, or does it? In fact, if you consider the question of whether animals can feel heartache, does your dog really know the pain of a six-month-long situationship?

By far, it is the avian world which dominates this field; a staggering 90% of bird species are classed as monogamous!

As always, we turn to science for the answer. The central question here is whether animals can conceptualise romantic love. For many creatures, relationships are undeniably strictly carnal in nature. However, there is plenty of evidence in the natural world to suggest that, for some animals, true love does exist. Creatures across many different species have been observed to mate for life: from mammals like California mice, to aquatic creatures like seahorses, to even cold-blooded reptiles like the Australian sleepy lizard.

By far, however, it is the avian world which dominates this field; a staggering 90% of bird species are classed as monogamous! Swans, geese, eagles, and some types of owls and penguins stay together until death do them part. Most famously, lovebirds structure their entire social organisation around the concept of pairs. They grow wildly jealous to the point where they cannot be kept in mixed aviaries with other kinds of songbird. The species’ habit of transferring food from one mate’s beak to the other in a sort of ‘kiss’ has made it the enduring image of love in the animal kingdom.

Will you ever have what they have? Probably not, but hopefully neither will they.

So, animals can fall in love, sure – but that doesn’t necessarily mean the existence of animal heartbreak. After all: break-ups are not part of romance in the animal kingdom. Yet, there is a far more widespread and final form of separation in nature; that being the grim threat of an untimely death. Whether animals have the capacity to mourn is the definitive answer to the existence of bestial heartbreak. What purer expression of love could there be than the despair at losing it forever?

Animals suffer far more heartbreak than us, but they make it through. If they can, you can too.

The fascinating and slightly tragic answer to this question is that wild animals absolutely can, and do, mourn their loved ones. In many instances, it is the collective grief of a group losing one of their unit. Wolves have been documented to search in vain for departed pack members with haunting, solitary howls. Scientific research has shown they suffer physically from the grief, developing stress-related injuries quaintly dubbed ‘broken heart syndrome’.

Meanwhile, the death of a crow will prompt the rest of its flock to perform a notoriously eerie ritual, surrounding and pecking the corpse in a process theorised to promote the concept of death among the surviving flock members. It is this ritual, in fact, that actually inspired the concept of a funeral for early humans – at least according to a story in the Qur’an, in which a raven teaches Cain how to bury his murdered brother. Asian elephants are similarly documented to practice funeral-like rituals, actually going as far as to bury their dead. Whales, on their part, display some of the most heartbreaking behaviours listed here by grieving for their children when they die. Rather than move on like crows, orcas have been widely documented to carry their dead calves with them along the ocean surface. Sometimes, they travel over a thousand miles in a truly anguishing display of love.

These anecdotes demonstrate an undeniable truth: animals grieve and must therefore love. There is a moral here, too. Your dog has never been ghosted, but unbeknownst to you until now, he has nursed a sense of loss for the siblings he never got to meet. Yet, outwardly they remain the same loyal and cheery pet. This should be a reminder come the day you find yourself lying in bed on day five of your post-breakup tv binge, that animals suffer far more heartbreak than us, but they make it through. If they can, you can too.