Finding solace: the role of animal chaplains in pet grief

When her Old English bulldog Lucy contracted lymphoma and died unexpectedly last year, Ingrid Nelson was rocked by grief. The dog was a deep source of support for Nelson, a sometimes overwhelmed single mom. “She was just my soul dog.”

Nelson’s grief was compounded by responses she got to her sadness: "Animals don’t even have souls", a neighbour said. A colleague told her animals don’t go to heaven and she’d never see Lucy again.

Nelson wanted answers to these theological and spiritual questions from her Christian faith, but she was wary of mentioning them at the Congregational church she attends in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Even though the denomination is liberal, she worried someone at the church would repeat the same unsympathetic doctrine. Instead, she said, “I internalized and prayed on it.”

And she went to see an animal chaplain.

The existence of animal chaplains, who offer spiritual care for people with pets, for people who work with animals and for animals themselves, is just one example of how Americans are increasingly reexamining the relationship between humans and the natural world, and in the process changing their religious and spiritual beliefs and practices.

Nelson met twice at a coffee shop with the Rev. Ginny Mikita, an ordained interfaith minister who runs a pet grief support group. Nelson wanted to know: How does God see nonhuman animals? She told Mikita about her feeling that her connection with Lucy contained mutual consciousness - even holiness.

What do you believe, Mikita recalls asking Nelson. How do you imagine heaven?

“This is really about, for the first time, for a lot of people, deeply thinking about these issues,” Mikita told The Washington Post. “What do I believe and why?”

The spiritual counsel from Mikita helped lift the “horrible gray cloud” of Lucy’s death. It led Nelson to delve into scriptural references to animals: In Genesis, God calls the creation of animals “good.” In the story of Noah, God makes a covenant with “every living creature.” God personally feeds animals in the Book of Psalms.

“Ultimately, what was my relationship with Lucy? It was love. There was a love, there was a bond. And what is God? God is love,” Nelson said. “What I choose to believe is we’re all part of God’s creation. And in some way, shape or form we will all be reunited again.”

Nelson’s experience is a small window into the growing sphere of faith-based support for people grieving animals.

Congregations and other spiritual and religious groups are increasingly offering grief programs for people who lost animals. Major theological groups such as the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Studies now have units devoted to “animal theology” research. That realm includes religious textual references and rituals about bonds between humans and animals, and the presence of religious-like behavior in animals, such as mourning rituals.

The percent of Americans who say their pets are “part of their family” has jumped in the past two decades from about 80 to 97 percent, Pew Research found. In a 2023 poll, Pew found that 51 percent of pet owners said their animal was as much a family member as a human member was.

Pet ownership surged during the pandemic, and homebound people grew deeply close to their companion animals. New research has expanded what’s known about animals’ capacity for empathy and wonder - attributes of spiritual experience. The rise in faith-based pet grief support also reflects that many Americans are increasingly exploring religion and spirituality focused more on nature as a whole and less on the idea of humans at the center.

“I see a lot of movement” in the organized religious world about nonhuman life, said the Rev. Sarah Bowen, an author who co-founded the Compassion Consortium, which offers resources about animals and spirituality and houses a chaplaincy training program. “We see many traditional faith groups making statements that are earth-based, and we can slip animals into there if we raise that question.”

A major development was “Laudato Si,” Pope Francis’s historic 2015 teaching document urging care for the environment. In it he wrote that “every act of cruelty towards any creature is ‘contrary to human dignity,’” and, about the afterlife: “Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place.”

In 2015, several leaders with the conservative Southern Baptist Convention and with the Humane Society of the United States (now called Humane World for Animals) helped launch a petition called “Every Living Thing” meant to “reclaim that evangelical tradition of understanding animals as an important part of God’s creation,” said Karen Swallow Prior, a Christian author who was part of the petition campaign and was at the time a member of the Humane Society’s now-defunct Faith Advisory Council.

The petition, which got more than 1,300 signatures, said that although humans “have greater worth” than other animals, humans cannot treat them as objects or be cruel them.

The effort fizzled out. In 2017 the SBC posted a video defending the dignity of animals, but it soon took down the video and apologized because it mentioned animal life as sacred in the same sentence as fetal life.

“As modern Americans we are deeply influenced by utilitarianism,” Prior said. “We measure worth according to usefulness. That is a philosophy more than theology.”

Even secular groups are responding to the evolving needs of religious people and their pets.

Raised Catholic, Ed Pessalano, a 42-year-old Brooklyn hotel security guard, has dabbled in recent years with Baptist churches and watches televangelists like Joel Osteen and Charles Stanley. He still reads his archdiocesan newspaper. But when his 14-year-old gray and white cat, Nugget, died in July, he didn’t seek help from traditional religious sources. He’d had multiple experiences in churches of people mocking his empathy for animals and his decision not to eat meat. He typed into Google: “Do pets go to heaven?” The results led to a Christian grief curriculum prepared by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“Catholics, Baptists - they’re focused on people. But when you look at the Bible, the entire thing is scattered with animals, animals have the same soul,” he said. Losing Nugget was “like losing a human being, because animals are pure love.”

He was blown away by PETA’s grief program, which has daily devotionals, reflections and journaling prompts for five weeks. “When I found this program … it was so beautiful,” he said.

The prompt on the third day asked: “How does reflecting on the reality of Heaven help you with the pain?” Pessalano’s response: “I imagine your new life to be free of old age and pain, and my Lord will hold you until we’re reunited again.”

Ed Martin, vice president of Hartsdale Pet Cemetery & Crematory, a historic graveyard north of New York City that buries 250 to 300 pets each year, said he’s seen more clergy come to funerals in recent years. At the same time, he encounters fewer people who sneer at the idea of a pet cemetery.

“It was like: ‘Your pet died, what are you crying for? Just go get another one,’” he said. “Fortunately, we’ve progressed.”

One day this month, Martin led a rabbi to a grave site where a couple and about 10 of their friends had assembled to bury a black terrier mix named Chance. The rabbi cited Genesis, which describes God creating animals before humans. The couple held each other and watched the small casket be lowered into the earth.