I’ll admit something that still catches me off guard. My partner and I have a whippet here in Singapore, and some evenings I watch him sleeping on the couch between us, his ribs rising and falling in that impossibly delicate way small dogs breathe, and I think about the fact that I will almost certainly outlive him. That thought arrives with a weight I wasn’t prepared for at 44. And when I’ve mentioned it to people, even close friends, the response is almost always some version of: “Well, you can always get another one.” They mean well. I know they mean well. But the phrase lands like a door closing on something I haven’t even lost yet.

Nobody says that to a parent whose child has died. Nobody looks at a mother standing at a graveside and says, “You could always have another one.” The sentence would be monstrous. Unthinkable. And yet with a dog, it flows out of people’s mouths as naturally as offering a glass of water.

The gap between those two responses reveals something uncomfortable about how we organize love. We don’t rank it by depth. We rank it by species.

The hierarchy nobody admits to

There’s an unspoken taxonomy of acceptable grief. Spouse. Parent. Child. Sibling. Close friend. And then somewhere far below, after colleagues and distant relatives, we place animals. The grief hierarchy isn’t written down anywhere, but everyone seems to know it instinctively. If you take a week off work because your father died, nobody questions it. If you take a week off because your dog died, people exchange glances.

This taxonomy operates on an assumption that the depth of a bond correlates with the biological complexity of the being you’ve lost. Humans above animals. Adults above children, in some unspoken way. The assumption is so deeply embedded that most people never examine it.

But grief doesn’t follow taxonomy. Grief follows attachment. And attachment doesn’t care about species.

Research into pet attachment and mental health has increasingly shown that the bonds people form with their animals can be psychologically similar, in many measurable ways, to bonds formed with humans. Studies have shown that interactions with pets can activate attachment systems and trigger oxytocin release, with the nervous system registering presence, comfort, and safety. Your prefrontal cortex doesn’t check whether the being next to you has opposable thumbs before deciding to love them.

Over nearly two decades of building companies across multiple countries, I’ve watched people lose partners, parents, careers, entire social worlds. And some of the most devastating grief I’ve witnessed was for animals. A woman I’ve known for about nine years, Rachel, 51, who runs a boutique financial advisory firm in Singapore, once told me she grieved her cat more acutely than she grieved her father. She said it calmly, the way you’d describe a fact about weather. Then she added: “And I’ve never told anyone else that, because I know exactly how it sounds.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

Why “get another one” cuts so deep

The phrase “you can always get another one” carries a specific psychological payload. It communicates that the relationship was interchangeable. That what you lost was a category (dog, pet, animal) rather than an individual. It reduces a unique attachment to a generic slot that can be refilled.

When someone says this, they’re not being cruel on purpose. They’re operating from the grief hierarchy. In their mental model, losing a pet sits somewhere between losing a favorite mug and losing a neighbor you waved to occasionally. The suggestion to “get another one” is logical within that framework. If your mug breaks, you buy a new mug.

But the person grieving isn’t mourning a category. They’re mourning a specific presence. The sound of particular paws on a particular floor. The weight of a specific head on their lap at a specific time each evening. The fact that this creature knew their rhythms, their moods, their bad days, without language, without explanation, without any of the performance that depth between humans sometimes requires.

That irreplaceability is exactly what makes the grief real. And the suggestion that it’s replaceable is exactly what makes the dismissal so painful.

Recent research found that one in five people reported losing a pet as more distressing than losing a human loved one. One in five. That’s not a fringe experience. That’s a substantial portion of the population carrying grief they’ve been socially trained to minimize.

The silence around animal grief

Here’s what I’ve observed, both in myself and in people around me: the grief for an animal often arrives without any of the support structures that human loss provides. There’s no funeral. No bereavement leave. No cards. No casseroles. No socially sanctioned period where you’re allowed to fall apart.

Instead, you’re expected to calibrate. To grieve quietly, proportionally, in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone or, worse, invite the comparison that everyone is thinking but nobody wants to say out loud: “It was just a dog.”

That word, “just,” does extraordinary psychological work. It positions the loss as inherently minor. It tells the griever that their emotional response is disproportionate to the event. And disproportionate grief, grief that exceeds what society considers appropriate for the object of loss, creates a very specific kind of shame.

You don’t just grieve the animal. You grieve while simultaneously managing the awareness that other people think you’re overreacting. The grief becomes double: loss plus suppressed desire to be seen accurately.

Research has found that grief after a pet’s death can be as long-lasting as mourning a human loved one. Some people experience significant grief symptoms years later. The duration of that grief tracks with attachment depth, not with the species of the being lost.

What the hierarchy actually protects

I’ve been thinking about why we maintain this ranking system so fiercely. And I think the grief hierarchy exists less to organize love and more to protect people from an uncomfortable truth: that love is anarchic. It doesn’t follow rules. It doesn’t respect categories. It attaches where it attaches, with whatever intensity it attaches, and no amount of social scaffolding can make it behave.

If we admitted that a person’s grief for their dog could be as devastating as grief for a parent, we’d have to rethink nearly everything about how we structure bereavement. Workplace policies. Social norms. The entire informal economy of sympathy and support.

More than that, we’d have to sit with the possibility that some people’s deepest, most authentic attachment was to a being that couldn’t speak, couldn’t reciprocate in words, couldn’t participate in the social contracts we consider essential to “real” relationships. And that possibility threatens something at the core of how we define human connection.

I’ve written before about friendships surviving on momentum, about relationships that look solid from the outside but have nothing underneath when the motion stops. The bond with an animal is almost the opposite. There’s no momentum, no social obligation, no shared professional interest keeping it alive. The relationship sustains itself purely on presence and mutual need. When that disappears, what’s left is a void that’s genuinely structural, not performative.

The quiet confession people make in private

Derek, 51, who I’ve known for about nine years here in Singapore, runs a logistics consultancy across Southeast Asia. He lost his German shepherd three years ago and his mother the year before that. We were having drinks near Boat Quay a few months back when he said something that stopped the conversation: “I processed my mother’s death in about six months. I’m still not over the dog.”

He wasn’t being callous about his mother. He loved her. But the relationship with his mother was complex, layered with decades of expectation and disappointment and unresolved emotional history. The relationship with the dog was simple. Pure presence, daily ritual, uncomplicated loyalty. And the loss of something uncomplicated, it turns out, can be harder to metabolize than the loss of something tangled, because there’s no ambivalence to cushion the impact.

With complicated relationships, grief comes mixed with relief, with anger, with the slow process of sorting through contradictory feelings. With an animal, there’s often nothing to sort. There’s only absence.

Derek said he’d never told his wife what he told me. He knew how it would land.

What changes when we stop ranking

I’m not suggesting that losing a dog and losing a child are equivalent experiences. The comparison isn’t the point. What I’m suggesting is that the reflexive dismissal of animal grief, the speed with which “get another one” leaves people’s mouths, reveals how poorly we understand attachment itself.

We assume that attachment scales with cognitive complexity. That loving a being who can discuss philosophy with you is somehow deeper than loving a being who simply sits beside you when you’re falling apart. But attachment, as psychology consistently demonstrates, is fundamentally about felt safety. About who your nervous system reaches for. About whose absence creates a hole that reorganizes your daily life.

By that measure, the love for an animal often sits right alongside the love for a human. Sometimes above it. And the world’s refusal to acknowledge that forces millions of people to grieve in silence, to shrink their loss into a socially acceptable shape, to nod politely when someone suggests they perform recovery faster than their hearts will allow.

The cruelest thing about “you can always get another one” isn’t the suggestion itself. It’s the worldview underneath it: that love has a proper scale, that grief has appropriate proportions, and that you, the person in pain, have exceeded your allotment.

My whippet is asleep on the couch as I write this. His ribs are rising and falling. One day they’ll stop. And when they do, I already know that some well-meaning person will tell me I can get another one. And I already know I won’t have the energy to explain why that sentence misses everything.