Read Online How Animals Grieve by Barbara J. King - Free Book Online Page B

suffered from a bad ear infection, molars in such poor shape that he couldn’t eat properly, and nerve damage in his feet from a declawing procedure. Curing Majic’s ear and dental problems wasn’t all that hard. The nerve damage, though, meant he couldn’t jump well. He began to relax around people and even to enjoy cuddling, but he acted defensively when put with other rabbits. He was kept isolated, in a house with thick, comfortable sleeping material, in the same room as Trixie and Joey. A perimeter was set up around his bed to make sure the other rabbits kept out, but no latched gate was deemed necessary because Majic made no effort to get out on his own.
    For two years, Joey and Trixie enjoyed their friendship. Then, Joey began to lose weight and his health worsened. He suffered a seizure. Joy and her husband consulted with a veterinarian, and they all agreed it was time to let Joey go. He was euthanized, and at the vet’s, Trixie was allowed to stay with his body for a while.
    Back home with Joy, Trixie was sad. She didn’t eat and, Joy recalls, she “made a small and pathetic picture as she lay in her empty house.” The next morning, though, Joy viewed an unexpected scene: Majic had jumped down from his bed and the two rabbits lay close to each other, prevented from close contact only by the door of Trixie’s house.
    After settling Majic back on his bed (for the sake of his damaged feet), Joy opened up a channel between their houses. For two days, Trixie shuttled back and forth between the two “home turfs,” and then she moved in with Majic. By the third day, the new friends were cuddling and grooming, and Trixie once again was eating well.
    Trixie was one of the lucky ones, just as Vincent had been. Some rabbits don’t come out of it so easily. Rabbits, like many other animals, may fall into serious depression when they mourn. In extreme instances, they may even starve themselves to death.
    Just as I was exploring the nature of severe depressive responses to grief, Karen Wager-Smith sent me a paper on the neurobiology of depression that she wrote with Athina Markou. Focusing on a wide variety of animals, including humans, Wager-Smith and Markou ask whether an understanding of the dynamic brain might cue us in to adaptive aspects of acute depression, the type that’s both symptomatically intense and relatively short in duration. The two scientists posit a chain of events that culminate in a person’s experience of acute depression. The trigger is some kind of stressful life event. Perhaps a person loses her job or faces an unwanted divorce. Or he may be sent for repeated tours of combat or lose his partner to death. Studies show that about three-quarters of initial depressive episodes are preceded by major stress of this kind.
    What happens next occurs at the neurophysiological level. The dynamic nature of the brain means it’s time to jettison old assumptions about an organ that remains fixed and static in adulthood, after a period of growth and adaptation during one’s younger years. In fact, our brains always grow and adapt at the physiological level. Each of us sees, thinks, and feels our way in response to events that occur (or that we create), and as we do, our brains rewire. In tandem with our experiences, neurons are strengthened or fall away. Some of the neural pruning that goes on, we might initially think of as negative: a loss of brain tissue, after all, doesn’t sound welcome. That’s where the second step in Wager-Smith and Markou’s sequence comes in.
    Wager-Smith and Markou describe types of “microdamage” that stress may inflict upon the brain and that reduce key neuronal connections in certain regions. Data from animal models suggest that in two brain areas, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, synaptic material may be reduced in the aftermath of stress. Because the hippocampus deals with memory and emotion, and the prefrontal cortex is a center of planning and personality,