Published by Unseen Progress, an independent publisher of pet-loss and caregiver research. Last reviewed 2026-06-17. Part of the pet loss grief research overview.
Short answer. When someone says "it was just a dog," "you'll get over it," "at least it wasn't a person," or "you can get another one," what you are feeling is your grief being invalidated in real time — a process researchers call disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1989). The comment is not evidence that your loss is small. It is evidence that the speaker has no framework for a loss like yours, even though roughly half of pet owners say their pets are as much family as a human member (Pew Research Center, 2023). You do not owe anyone a debate about whether your grief is valid. The most reliable move is to state your boundary once, calmly, without apology, and then close the subject.
The phrases sting because they arrive at the exact moment you are most exposed. You are already carrying the loss; the comment adds a second message on top of it — and you are wrong to feel this way. That double hit is what makes "it was just a dog" disproportionately painful for its four small words.
Kenneth Doka named this in 1989. Disenfranchised grief is grief that "is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned" (Doka, 1989). Pet loss is one of its clearest cases: there is no funeral leave, no casserole on the doorstep, no card in the mail. When a dismissive comment lands, you are not imagining the lack of support — you are running into a social script that has no slot for what you lost. A qualitative review of bereaved owners found this pattern again and again: people grieve deeply and then meet a wall of minimization that compounds the loss rather than easing it (Cleary et al., 2022).
There is also a wiring reason the words stick. Negative social feedback registers harder and lingers longer than positive feedback — "bad is stronger than good" is one of the most robust findings in social psychology (Baumeister et al., 2001). Ten kind condolences can be erased by one "it was just a cat." That is not weakness on your part. It is how human attention is built.
Here is the reframe that changes everything: the dismissal describes the speaker's inner world, not yours. Someone who has never bonded closely with an animal has no felt reference for what you are going through. Research on pet loss is blunt about this — the intensity of grief tracks the closeness of the bond, not the species of the one who died (Eckerd et al., 2016). A person who never had that closeness is, in effect, reporting from a country they have never visited.
So "you can get another one" is not a verdict on your dog. It translates to: I think of pets as replaceable, because mine were. "At least it wasn't a person" translates to: I rank losses on a ladder I have never had to climb for an animal. "She's in a better place" usually means: I don't know what to say and I want this conversation to be comfortable for me. None of these are facts about your loss. They are confessions of a missing framework.
Owners feel the gap precisely. As one put it, "he was just a cat, you'll get better — but they don't understand he was my everything." Another: "she's in a better place — no, her place was with me." The grief is articulate and specific; the dismissal is generic and borrowed. That mismatch is the whole story. When owners say "people don't want to hear it," they are reading the room correctly — and the correct response is not to argue your way into being heard by someone who lacks the receiver.
This matters because Pew's 2023 data shows you are not the outlier in this exchange — the dismisser is. About half of U.S. pet owners now say their pets are as much a part of their family as a human member (Pew Research Center, 2023). The cultural consensus has shifted toward you. The person saying "it was just a dog" is increasingly the minority voice.
It is tempting to absorb the comment, nod, and bury the feeling to avoid friction. The problem is that suppression carries a price. Healthy grieving involves moving back and forth between facing the loss and stepping away from it — the dual process model calls these the loss-oriented and restoration-oriented modes (Stroebe & Schut, 1999). Dismissive comments push you to skip the loss-oriented side entirely, to act as if there is nothing to face. Grief does not disappear when it is hidden; it just loses its outlets.
Disenfranchisement specifically removes the social supports that ordinarily help — the rituals, the permission, the people who simply listen (Doka, 1989). When owners say "non-supportive comments are out of control," they are describing an environment where the normal machinery of mourning has been switched off. The cost is not abstract: unsupported, suppressed grief is associated with more complicated, prolonged trajectories (Cleary et al., 2022). You are not protecting yourself by going quiet. You are removing your own oxygen.
The goal of a good script, then, is not to win the argument. It is to protect your right to grieve without spending energy you do not have. State the boundary, keep your outlets open, and route the deeper grief toward people and tools that actually hold it.
The principle for all three is the same. One calm sentence. No apology. No justification. You are not opening a debate; you are closing a door. Deliver it in a level voice and then change the subject or leave. If you over-explain, you hand the other person more to argue with.
For a coworker (keep it professional and final):
For a family member (warm but firm — these comments often come from people who mean well):
For a partner (closest bond, highest stakes — name the need directly):
A few rules that make the scripts work:
Some people will not get there, and that is information, not failure. If someone returns to "it was just a dog" after you have set the boundary once, the productive move is not a better script — it is distance. You are allowed to grieve without that person. Withdrawing from a repeatedly dismissive relationship, even temporarily, is a legitimate act of self-protection, not avoidance.
Spend the energy you save on people who already have the framework. Other owners who have lost an animal will not need the speech; the bond is the shared reference point, and closeness — not species — is what makes a loss land (Eckerd et al., 2016). Pet-loss support communities, hotlines, and a small number of friends who simply say "tell me about him" are worth more than a converted skeptic. Many owners also keep the bond alive in private ways — a photo, a routine, talking to them — and these continuing bonds are a healthy part of adjustment, not a sign of being stuck (Klass et al., 1996; Packman et al., 2011).
You can also externalize the grief that has nowhere to go socially — writing it down, marking the dates, having one place that treats the loss as real. That is part of why we built PetArc: a quiet companion for the grief the world keeps telling you to hurry past. The comment "it was just a dog" was never the truth about your loss. It was just the limit of the person saying it.
Unseen Progress publishes long-form pet-loss research and builds PetArc, a research-backed companion for grieving pet owners. See the full pet loss grief research overview for the complete framework.