A goldfish funeral is a joke, a dog funeral is solemn: Species erasure as an agentic response to disenfranchised companion-animal grief

When a dog dies, friends say they are sorry; when a lizard dies, the owner often meets silence. That society mourns some companion-animal deaths more than others is a recognized form of disenfranchized grief, yet research has asked how owners endure it, not whether they answer back. Screening 86,548 Reddit posts collected over five years, we computed six facets for 30,703 confirmed grief posts. Two findings were identified. A subset of owners omit the species and write only cross-species kinship terms such as "my best friend," a move we call species erasure that is associated with the highest community response; and the most disenfranchized owners use it most (23.3% of fish owners versus 1.1% of cat owners). The pattern held stable across the window, robust to the COVID companion-animal adoption wave. Read through continuing bonds and meaning reconstruction, species erasure is an outward bid for the right to grieve.