The grief no one puts on a form.

Your employee's dog of fourteen years died over the weekend. On Monday they're at their desk, because there's no leave for this and they'd feel foolish asking. They're quiet, a little slow, missing the small things they never miss. If you knew the reason, you'd understand it completely. You don't, because a pet's death is the one loss that never makes it onto a form, so the dip gets noticed and the cause stays invisible.

This is not a fringe scenario. Pets live in more than half of Canadian households, and the 2024 Canadian Pet Population Survey counted roughly 7.2 million dogs and 8.2 million cats across the country.¹ For a lot of people, that animal is a genuine member of the family, part of the daily routine for a decade or more. When it dies, the grief that follows is not a performance. It's the same machinery that grief for a person runs on.

The grief is real, and the research says so

Studies of pet bereavement describe the same symptoms clinicians see after a human death: sadness, disrupted sleep, trouble concentrating, and a loss of appetite.² These aren't metaphors. They're the ordinary cognitive and physical effects of loss, and they show up at work as slowed thinking, shorter focus, and a few rough nights bleeding into rough mornings.

Recent work has gone further. A 2025 study found that people who had lost a pet were 27 percent more likely to develop symptoms of prolonged grief disorder than those who hadn't, a figure that sits between the rates for losing a parent and losing a sibling.³ Around 7.5 percent met the clinical criteria for prolonged grief, comparable to the rates that follow many human deaths.³ Whatever assumptions a workplace carries about pet loss being minor, the evidence doesn't support them.

The impact is visible; the cause is dismissed

Here's where it costs the employer. The grieving employee is at work, but not fully. Focus is thin, deadlines wobble, the careful work gets a little less careful. That impact is real and a manager will feel it. What stays hidden is why, and in this case the reason isn't just undisclosed, it's actively dismissed, because almost no bereavement policy in the country acknowledges a pet as a loss worth a single day. So the employee grieves in silence, judges themselves for struggling over "just a dog," and the performance dip goes unexplained and unsupported.

That silence is the expensive part. An employee who feels they have to hide a genuine loss learns something about how much their whole self is welcome at work, and that lesson shows up later in engagement and in retention. The cost of ignoring it is quiet but real. The cost of acknowledging it is almost nothing.

The cheapest loyalty win you have

This is rare in workforce support: a problem where naming it is most of the solution. A short, explicit recognition that pet loss is real grief, a day to absorb it, and a place to turn for support costs an employer very little and buys something that's hard to earn any other way. It tells your people that the company sees them as human, and people remember exactly who treated them that way when their heart was broken over an animal nobody else took seriously.

Our Next Chapter pet loss support gives employees a credentialed place to bring that grief, so it doesn't have to be carried alone or hidden at a desk. It's a small, humane investment that protects focus, protects loyalty, and signals something no benefits brochure can. The employees living this right now won't ask you to recognize it. The organizations that do it anyway are the ones people don't leave.