Absolutely. These comments sum up the baseline assumption that cats are radically different than us when it comes to emotions. Sure, it's not 100% the same, but cats' capacity to feel all sorts of feelings we sometimes only attribute to humans is actually much greater than we tend to think. One recent study covered by NPR heavily suggests that cats exhibit a lot of behavioural changes we would attribute to grief. Humans experience all these behavioral changes because we grieve - like loss of appetite, increased tiredness, etc. - but all these physical examples occur because we feel something. And that is true for cats as well. They don't just change their behavior because they want to, but because grief (in this case) causes these physical symptoms to appear.
And just as we know grief in humans needs time to be processed and accepted, so it does with cats. But this mama cat wasn't even given the courtesy of grieving, of mourning the loss of the thing most important to her in the world. That is a major error, a severe lack of empathy on the part of the shelter workers. A grieving cat shouldn't be punished for what they feel - they should be met with a ton of compassion and care for their situation.
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