Ah! I just read that book (currently on the third in the trilogy), and I know exactly what you mean. When I got to that point I could almost feel my heart breaking, and I thought back to my own dog from when I was growing up, and… well, my allergies might have acted up suddenly and caused a little eye watering to occur.
I’m glad you spoiler tagged the book, because it really is a great book. Unlike some other trilogies (Hunger Games?) it has stayed very even in quality throughout the whole thing.
Didn’t even occur to me at that age ( probably ~11 ). Red fern? What the hell is that? I figured it was a place name for some idyllic getaway back in the woods were the kid liked to hang out. Wrong ;).
I was a BIG consumer of dog literature when I was a wee lad, including occasionally disturbing collections like this one or the somewhat depressing Bob, Son of Battle. But mostly I consumed a lot of Albert Payson Terhune and Jim Kjelgaard material. While dogs occasionally perished in them they usually weren’t straight tragedies like WTRFG or Ol’ Yeller, which frankly I’ve never much enjoyed.
While I’m at it screw John Steinbeck and The Red Pony as well :D.
When I was younger I was always torn up when a dog died (I named my stuffed animal “Old Yeller.”
I remember one movie where a young girl’s dog (and companion. I remember the movie vaguely. She had a conversation with her mother about petty cash, that’s all I remember) dies by eating rat poison set out by the girl’s neighbor. That jerk.
And then there was a book I read in the 3rd grade about this boy’s dog who was killed by pipes, I think, that fell off the back of a truck. I seriously remember nothing about that book, except the ending.
Exactly this! I was about that age and I thought maybe it was a secret hiding place, you know, “Hey, after school, meet me where the red fern grows” or something. The only ferns I was aware of at that age grew in peoples yards or the redwood forests we went camping. No way would I have thought, based on the title, it had anything to do with death.
It’s possible that I was just a morbid child, but while I agree that ferns connote quiet seclusion (and thus either an idyll or gravesite), at the same time red=blood=death.
Of course it’s hard to remember exactly what I was thinking at the time, given that 2/3 of my life has passed since then. What I know for sure is that even though I didn’t even like the book and hardly remember a thing about it, when I saw the title in this thread I immediately thought “oh right, the fern grows at the gravesite”.
Anyway, that dog in Independence Day totally should have died. Explosions do not work that way.
In “A Boy and his Dog”, staring a young Don Johnson, the dog lives and the girl dies. Because he feeds the girl to the dog.
After all, a boy loves his dog.
I believe that the boy learns that the red fern grows up between the graves of lovers. The dogs die and he buries them and a red fern grows there.
I just re-watched Jaws. (Dog dies)
In high school we read a non-fiction book called A Walk Across America. I’m not linking to it as you shouldn’t bother reading it. A guy sets out to walk across America with his dog. Does the dog make it? Hell no! And this is a real dog. There are photos of the dog in the book and everything.
Well, I’ll offer a perspective as an adult. I never read “Where the Red Fern Grows” and in no way would I have ever thought it had anything to do with death. Yes, red can mean those things, but I have no reason to assume it is going to out of context.
I mean, I’m sure I would have figured out that the dog dies, because tragedy like that is what these classics always do, but not from the title alone.
I haven’t seen the movie but doesn’t the dog die naturally of old age in Marley and Me? Granted, that probably doesn’t make things better but it is different than than if the dog died prematurely by being hit by a car or getting rabies or something like that.
It is a cheap trick. My friends and I think it’s simply because they want a shock for the audience and they don’t have the guts to kill a kid.
Sounds like "A Dog Called Kitty"by Bill Wallace. I switched him out for Bruce Coville and Lloyd Alexander after I checked out a couple of his books and he was two for two when it came to killing off the beloved pet.
It’s not quite on the main track of the thread (with which I am in major sympathy even as an over-the-hill guy) but it has always amused me since I first saw Shane as a kid how you can tell there’s going to be some massive bloodletting and gunplay: a dog will slink away from the people on screen.
Is it just my not noticing or do cats never get that much love in movies and books like dogs do? I’ve had two cats to die after long lives and both of them caused me more grief than most of my dead relatives.
Does anybody else have a strong memory for what’s going on in the first minute or two of The Wild Bunch?
It’s been years since I read it, but as a child I didn’t find it cheap at all. For me, it was all about how doing the right thing can be really fucking hard and feel really wrong and be totally unfair and you still have to do it.
Ditto this. I don’t like being manipulated and having my emotions jerked around. It’s a cheap trick as Zsofia says. Put in the nickel, pull the handle, reader’s/viewer’s blood pressure goes up. It makes me furious when writers/moviemakers do this to me.
They play with this trope a little in the terrible Mark Wahlberg movie Shooter:
in which he gets framed for assassinating someone important, and the people sent to his house as part of the job kill his dog. Later on, he’s exacting his revenge in a particularly brutal fashion, which seems to alarm the people he’s strongarmed into helping him clear his name. He shouts, “They killed my dog!” His helpers immediately understand and allow him to carry on with his rampage 
In the new Starz’ series “MAGIC CITY”:
2 episodes - 2 dead dogs.
Batting a thousand.
That book punched me in the gut when I was 11 too, but I think it was needed. It was the first book in which I had that strong of an emotional connection to the characters. It introduced me to grief and loss, as I had been fortunate enough not to experience that in my life already. The shock hurt, but it was a necessary kind of pain, and experiencing it through a book rather than in reality when a family member or pet died for the first time helped ease me into dealing with that.
Maybe since he works with you in rescue he’s already been introduced to it, and you certainly know your child better than I would, but my initial reaction is that you probably shouldn’t have told him.
Not to me. I surely had no idea. Granted, even now when I consider myself relatively savvy, literarily speaking, I don’t often notice twist foreshadowing or even contemplate the meaning of titles until after reading the book/seeing the movie.
BOOMER WILL LIVE.
They did this in I am Legend.
I also didn’t particularly care for Scotty beaming Archer’s beagle into… nowhere, and the scene is played for laughs. (Star Trek reboot.)
They kind of lampshade it however, in War of the Roses. Michael Douglas accidentally runs over Kathleen Turner’s cat. She, in turn, feeds him pate and implies it’s made from his dog. It wasn’t; we see the dog just a few seconds later, as Douglas goes into a murderous rampage.
And Rorschach from The Watchmen?. He can go straight to hell.
In Stephen King’s It, Henry Bowers kills Mike Hanlon’s dog in this manner. Bowers was a sociopath, and Hanlon was his next-door neighbor (who happened to be part of the only black family in town).
Spoilers for this movie? Really? Ah well.
Not exactly natural causes. His stomach gets twisted, twice, which is very painful and often fatal. His owner, John, has him put to sleep rather than put him through a surgery he’d likely not survive. He was very old and had other medical problems as well, so it was a very peaceful and good end.