Every listing below was confirmed on the organisation's own website, not copied from another directory. Four widely-published hotlines turned out to be dead; they are named at the bottom so you don't waste a call on them.
If you are in crisis right now
Pet loss lines are not mental health lines
Cornell says this plainly about its own service, and it is the most important thing on this page. Grief after losing an animal is real grief, and it can get dangerous. If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, the numbers below are the ones to call — they are staffed around the clock by people trained for exactly this, and losing a dog is a legitimate reason to use them.
988988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text, 24/7, free and confidential. Chat at 988lifeline.org. US only. Spanish and Deaf/HoH services available.
Text HOME to 741741Crisis Text Line — 24/7, free. Spanish: text HOLA. Outside the US: Canada 686868, UK 85258, Ireland 50808 — 741741 will not work.
Listed elsewhere. No longer operating.
These appear on directory sites, memorial sites, and in at least two cases on university veterinary pages. Each was checked against the operator's own website and none of them is running.
Washington State University Pet Loss Hotline
Closed 1 July 2019. WSU announced it in their own newsroom, citing the demands of a callback service and student volunteers facing callers with mental health crises they were "not trained and not legally capable of handling." WSU's current pet loss page carries no hotline. The closure announcement
University of Illinois CARE Pet Loss Helpline — 217-244-2273
Closed. Illinois' own page says: "The CARE Helpline is no longer in operation." Virginia Tech's veterinary social work page was still publishing this number as of its last update. Illinois' closure page
ASPCA Pet Loss Support — 877-GRIEF-10
The ASPCA does not operate a pet loss hotline. Their contact page lists every ASPCA phone line — poison control, adoption, hospital, donations — and no grief line appears among them. This number is not published anywhere on aspca.org.
Ohio State University pet loss hotline
The OSU page announcing changes to the hotline now returns a 404, and their current pet loss page lists no OSU line — it refers people to Cornell, Tufts and Lap of Love instead. What survives is Honoring the Bond, listed above, which is open only to OSU hospital clients.
⚠ Lap of Love — 855-352-5683
Not a closure, but a number to avoid. Two university veterinary pages publish this as Lap of Love's support line. It appears nowhere on Lap of Love's own website. The number confirmed on their site is (855) 933-5683, listed above.
How this directory was checked
Existing pet-loss directories copy each other. That is why numbers that stopped working in 2019 are still circulating in 2026, and why two universities are currently publishing a phone number that the organisation it belongs to has never listed.
Candidates were gathered from existing directories, university pages, and search — but nothing was accepted from them.
Every entry was then confirmed on the operating organisation's own domain. A listing on a .edu referral page does not count as confirmation; two of them were wrong.
Anything that could not be confirmed at source was excluded and is not shown, however widely it is listed elsewhere.
Where an organisation does not publish its hours, cost, or staffing, this page says so rather than guessing.
Where a service is restricted to a hospital's own clients or one state, that restriction is on the card — several are, and existing directories rarely mention it.
What this check found. Of ten university veterinary programmes examined, only two run a public pet-loss phone line: Cornell and Tufts. The rest are scheduled groups, client-only social work services, or referral pages. And no verified service is a 24/7 live-answer line staffed by licensed clinicians and reachable by the general public — which is why the crisis numbers are at the top of this page rather than the bottom.
Found something out of date? Hours change, volunteers move on, and services close quietly. If you called a number here and it did not work, please say so — corrections to this page are the most useful message it can receive.