Even the Wild Has a Heart

In our world, when death comes, we know the rituals.

We light candles. We whisper prayers. We write obituaries and gather around casseroles. We try—sometimes through tears, sometimes through silence—to make sense of it all. To give grief a shape. To say goodbye.

But out in nature, there are no eulogies.
No tombstones.
No soft words spoken over a body.
Only instinct. Stillness.
And sometimes… something more.

I saw a photo recently—just a small bird, hunched over the lifeless body of another.
Not pecking. Not scavenging. Not panicked.
Just there. Still. Present.
As if it understood what had been lost.
As if it refused to walk away from love, even after death had come.

We like to believe that emotions are uniquely human.
That grief belongs to poets, that compassion is a higher-level virtue, that only we know the ache of absence.
But nature tells another story.

Because I’ve seen it.
You probably have too.
A dog laying on the grave of its owner, un-moving for hours.
A mother deer returning to the spot where her fawn once lay, day after day, sniffing the earth like it still holds breath.
A horse leaning into the lifeless body of its stable mate, as if trying to lift it back to life with the weight of its own body.

They feel it.
Not in the way we rationalize it, but in the rawness of being.
In the space that love used to fill.

We often act as if animals are less-than. As if they’re simple, emotionally hollow, just creatures of instinct.
But instinct alone doesn’t stay behind after life is gone.
Instinct doesn’t nuzzle the body of the fallen.
Instinct doesn’t wait.
Love does.

And we—humans—would do well to notice that.

Because sometimes the wild teaches us more about grace than our own sanctuaries.
Sometimes the silent witness of an animal mourning says more than all our sermons.
Sometimes, the creature with fur, feathers, or scales understands loyalty more deeply than those of us who are capable of reciting vows.

There’s a sacredness in the way animals love.
They don’t care what you look like. They don’t measure your worth. They don’t keep score.
They show up, stay close, and somehow just know when your heart is breaking.

They know how to comfort without fixing.
How to sit in silence without rushing to fill the void.
How to offer presence—not as a solution, but as a sacred act of solidarity.

And when they lose someone they love—human or otherwise—they mourn.
Not with fanfare. Not with posts. Not with sympathy cards or casseroles.
But with presence.
Stillness.
And sometimes, a refusal to leave.

That kind of grief doesn’t need to be spoken to be understood.
It is known by the heart.
By the spirit.
By the shared experience of loving deeply—and losing.

So if you’ve ever doubted whether animals have souls, I urge you to watch a grieving pet.
If you’ve ever questioned whether they feel, pay attention to how they act when one of their own is gone.
And if you’ve ever dismissed them as “just animals,” I hope one day you have the privilege of being loved by one—because you’ll learn what devotion truly looks like.

Even in the wild, the heart knows what it’s lost.
And sometimes, even the smallest creatures carry the heaviest feelings.

Not because they understand death.
But because they understand love.

And love, even in silence, always leaves a mark.

—Dr. Nick