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Pet Loss in Death-Related Literature for Children

The death of a pet—or, as some prefer to call it, a companion animal—is a frequent subject in death-related literature for children. Pets are important to children for many reasons; for example, they serve as friends, playmates, and sources of unconditional love. In addition, pets help teach children about the responsibilities that are involved in caring for another living creature. Also, because the life cycles of most animals that become pets are much shorter than those of the humans who care for them, pets often teach children important lessons about loss, death, grief, and coping. For all of these reasons, when I began writing about death-related literature for children my attention was soon drawn to books within that general category that told stories about the death of a pet. In this article, my purpose is to describe and examine a selected sample of 20 books for children whose principal subject or story line is concerned with pet loss. Full bibliographical information for each of these books appears in the list of “Children's Literature” at the end of this article.