When I got divorced (we were in our late 20s, no kids) we had three dogs and you bet your sweet bippy their custody was in the divorce decree.

It really is! It's heartbreaking, especially because you can't really "fix" it.

Short answer: no, but it can be prevented from reoccurring by performing an ovariohysterectomy (spaying in dogs). An animal who has had a false pregnancy is exponentially more likely to have one again, and the likelihood increases with the age of the unaltered animal.

Thanks! Yeah, it sounds like she has some issues that complicate the false pregnancy, but the people saying "how is this a thing?" "but why doesn't she get it?" etc. don't realize that the syndrome isn't THAT rare in the larger sense and it does mess with every system in the body.

Yeah, I commented about this phenomenon somewhere down in the greys— I see more "false pregnancies" in animals than the average person might think. There are a lot of things about this particular story that make the situation more nuanced, but the physical changes include brain activity/hormone production and…

So, this was a very small part of the entire article, but as a professional who deals not infrequently with animal false pregnancy, here's a bit of biological perspective:

Sarah Michelle Gellar, not a person I had very strong feelings about 120 seconds ago, has become infinitely cooler to me.