I’ve noticed this more and more over the last few years too. It’s just a cheap and easy way to show that the bad guy is really bad.
Marley and Me doesn’t count, because it was a story about the entire life of a dog. You tell the entire life of any animal, humans included, and it has to end in the animal’s death, at least off-screen, because that’s the end of its life.
While Boomer lived through the initial explosion in Independence Day, I keep wondering… what happened to him? You never see him at Area 51 or anywhere else after that. Where did Boomer go?
See, I don’t know if I can read the second and third book, because every time I think about the first one I think about the dog dying. And I can’t seem to keep from thinking about the book, because it was so good - but god, it was just crushing.
Seconding this. It’s pretty funny, too.
Random thoughts -
Love Gordon Korman - he comes up with some clever ideas, “kid’s book writer” or no.
someone mentioned “A Boy and hid Dog” upthread - After all, a boy loves his dog - I had planned to mention that one, darn it!
At the beginning of The Wild Bunch aren’t a bunch of kids torturing a scorpion with ants? (upthread question). Kids are mean.
In Alien or Aliens, can’t remember which, everyone was worried about whether Ripley’s cat was going to survive.
and in “Fatal Attraction” we knew that Glen Close deserved to die when she killed the poor bunny.
and if the horse survived in “War Horse” that was pretty unrealistic.
Just watched the replay of “Little Dorritt” on Masterpiece Classics. The villain is uber-creepy and is actually shown stabbing one man to death. But what really got me is when he killed the family dog (off stage). They just showed the husband’s shadow bending down and then calling out the dog’s name in horror. The villain, who was walking away, turned toward the house and mimicked the dog’s bark.
I was truly disappointed that he died by having a house fall on him a la the Wicked Witch of the East. He deserved far worse. Dickens disappoints.
I saw some list in which the dog dies in “Lassie Come Home.” I said, “Wha? Lassie survives.” Then today my daughter was telling of some alternate names she has for The Little Girls, Toto and Toots. “Toots? Who is Toots?”
“She was in ‘Lassie Come Home’ and…”
I cut her off, remembering who Toots was and her fate. “You bastard!” I cried, “I had that memory successfully blocked and you unblocked it.”
Never been a King fan but when Cell was published you could read the first chapter online for free. IIRC, in the first few pages King has the affected people killing or maiming at least two dogs. It struck me as so blatantly manipulative that I never botherd with the rest.
OK, I know this thread is a zombie, but that’s ironic, because I’ve just been reading again World War Z.
There’s a chapter in which a guy describes how he became involved with the training of dogs to work against the reanimated dead. How dogs and people bond so closely, and if a dog partner is killed, the odds are 50-50 the human will suicide.
But before that, during the panic, he describes his escape to safe ground. He’d been in an apartment across the street from an abandoned pet shop, and although the dead were not able to get in, he could hear the puppies crying and screaming for help, then going silent as their water ran out.
Damn, I’m tearing up just thinking about it. And it was fictional! Not real!. Just a story! But it still hurts. People are dying all over the world, and I’m depressed at the dying puppies. The author knows what buttons to push.
My childhood antithesis to “the dog dies at the end” was Jack London. In his stories, the dog lives…but the people die tragically!
Every damn book we read in 5th grade had the dog die at the end.
Except Bridge to Terabithia.
I’ve got two more: in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, they are helping a family escape from the terminator. The kid asks "What about Charles Barkley (the dog)? The answer is a resounding “NO.”
And never read Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. They vivisect two dogs, cutting them open without anesthesia and trying to see how long the dog will live. They do this twice and neither time did it have any bearing on the plot. The dogs were described as “screaming.”
I put the book down after that.
My grandson loves 80’s SciFi/Fantasy movies (Krull, Flash Gordon, etc.), so I showed him Beastmaster. No good: a ferret dies. He’ll never watch it again.
Immediately I thought of *Endymion *by Dan Simmons, in which (this is not a spoiler) the beloved hunting dog is killed by an idiot hunter, which is the first plot point in the book that sets the whole rest of the book in motion. At least it’s right at the beginning, before you have a chance to get *too *attached to the unfortunate pooch.
I hated, hated, hated reading that part nonetheless. Thanks for the warning about Quicksilver—I’m seriously going to avoid that one now. ::shudder::
It’s not a dog, but The death of Hedwig the owl in the last Harry Potter book… felt pretty cheap and unnecessary.
Two decade old spoiler alert…
Stephen King’s PET SEMATARY…
the cat dies…
the toddler dies…
TWICE!
I just caught up on the latest Wool books, and
even though Solo’s cat lived to a ripe old age I was still sad in my bones. It put me in a real funk for days.
Still, nothing like The Knife of Never Letting Go. Fuck that book.
Old Yeller should be removed from public circulation - film and book. Fucking movie scarred me to this day. Oh, and Bambi just finished me off.
GD Disney. If they’re going to continue to vault movies, that POS cartoon deserves a millenium or two in cold storage.
This thread, unpleasant as it is to read, lends context to Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie”—
Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!" he said.
Which leads back to the OP question of “Why do they always have to kill the dog?” Why does that even have to be a poetic metaphor? 