Kill the Pet, Kill the Book’s Rating: The Perils of Writing Dogs in Fiction

There are three types of people in the world: Dog people, cat people, and those who like neither (psychopaths). I am, unquestionably, a dog person. I don’t entirely trust cats—they are far too self-assured and independent. I identify far more with the neediness and fierce loyalty of a dog.

I have two border terriers—Alby, a five-year-old hooligan, and Otto who is fifteen years old, stone-deaf, partly blind and very shaky on his pins. We adore them both.

The next best thing to my hounds is a fictional canine. I grew up with Snoopy, and empathized every time he hunched over his typewriter, failing to get past It was a dark and stormy night…, and Dogmatix—from Asterix and Obelix, who howled like his little doggy heart was breaking every time a tree was felled in the forest.

I moved onto Lassie, and spent the next ten years urging various confused dogs to fetch help! My little brother is stuck in a mineshaft. Even as an adult, I loved the rescue dog Six-Thirty, from Bonnie Garmus’s novel, Lessons in Chemistry.

It’s no surprise, then, that in each of my three novels a canine plays a major role. If I’m going to spend two years immersed in a fictional world, I want a world that includes a dog. A really great dog.

Dogs can be a wonderful literary device: we discover a lot about our main character’s thoughts and feelings by what they tell their dog in a quiet moment. And in fiction, as in real life, the way a person treats a dog tells us an awful lot about them.

I had great fun playing with this truth in my new novel—How to Age Disgracefully. In one of the very first chapters, an elderly dog is left orphaned, and three of my main characters agree to share her care. However, they all have very different ideas of how to look after her—what to feed her, rules about furniture, even what to call her. We learn a lot about them, and the differences between them, from the choices they make.

There is a very large caveat to all of this. You can, and should, include a dog in your novels, make them a character in their own right, and central to the action, but be very, very careful how you treat them.

I learned this lesson when my debut novel—The Authenticity Project—was published. I included an old, abandoned, mongrel called Keith, who was adopted by one of my main characters. I adored Keith and so, it turned out, did my readers. I made the mistake of leaving Keith (spoiler alert) at the end of the book, alone and abandoned once again.

Over the next twelve months, I received around one hundred emails and messages from people all over the world who were desperate to know what happened to Keith. They’d tell me they’d been unable to sleep for worrying about him and that they’d not be able to forget about him until their minds had been put at rest. Where did he go? Is he okay?

I suppose I could have replied he didn’t go ANYWHERE. He is neither okay, nor not okay, because he doesn’t exist. He is a figment of my imagination, so please go back to sleep! But of course, I didn’t.

Instead, I thanked the Great Muse for enabling me to create a character that people cared about so much and asked Her to please enable me to keep doing so. Then, I replied to each and every concerned reader, explaining exactly how Keith was adopted by (spoiler alert) Monica and Hazard, and lived out his retirement very happily in Monica’s café.

Before the paperback edition of The Authenticity Project was published, I asked my editors to include an extra paragraph in the author’s note, explaining what happened to Keith in the years after the story ended. Now I receive far fewer messages about him.

Given the response I had to Keith’s abandonment, imagine what would have happened if I’d (gulp) killed him….

I asked the wonderful readers in Facebook’s Good Housekeeping Book Room how they felt about novels in which a dog dies. The response was fascinating. It seems that it’s okay to kill off human characters in all sorts of dramatic, brutal and grisly ways, but absolutely not okay to kill the dog.

One of the main objections that readers seemed to have with dog deaths is the fact that dogs are the innocent parties in the story. They feel manipulated, as if they’ve been encouraged to feel a strong connection with this animal, only for them to be thrown under a bus (sometimes literally), as an “emotional sacrifice.”

Readers also talk about feeling stressed when reading any book where a dog is a key character, in anticipation of that animal dying. For example, “As soon as a book introduces a dog, I feel like I get a trigger warning, and spend the book waiting for the dog to die.”

Author Claire Fuller tells me that in her novel, Unsettled Ground, the dog goes missing and is presumed dead. She gets emails from readers who are half way through and need reassuring about Maud’s survival before they’re happy to continue reading.

I do empathize. I remember, vividly, a long car journey up to Scotland with my husband and three young kids. I announced that we were all going to listen to an audiobook—The Knife of Never Letting Go. (If you’ve read the book, you’ll know exactly where this is going. Feel free to skip ahead a few lines if you want to avoid the trauma).

My kids loved that book, as did I. And they especially loved the dog, Manchee. The great thing about Manchee is that he could talk, and we had many conversations en route about what our own dogs would say to us if the could. We agreed that, like Manchee, their conversations would be mainly about poo and squirrels.

And then, at around the Newcastle bypass, (spoiler alert), Manchee dies. And the children (and I) wept all the way to Scotland, with my husband at the wheel shouting pull yourselves together! He’s just an imaginary dog! We’ve still not entirely recovered.

I didn’t, however, blame Patrick Ness, the author. In my opinion, anyone who can tell a story that makes me actually weep is a genius. But it seems as though some readers do very much blame the author for an animal death. One reader says ‘Tempted to name and shame the author who did this to me recently, and ruined her track record of very loved books! Never have I been more furious.’

I asked my author friends about their experience of killing dogs, and other animals, in fiction, and the stories were brutal. Beth Morrey (author of The Love Story of Missy Carmichael) still receives messages, four years after publication, from irate readers after (spoiler alert) an emotional dog death.

Author Cally Taylor (C. L. Taylor) says “One woman on Goodreads basically threatened to report me to an animal abuse charity because a dead bird was left on someone’s doorstep in one of my books, and an evil character threw a stone at a cat (they missed).”

Killing an animal (especially a dog) can seriously affect an author’s star ratings on Goodreads and Amazon and, therefore, impact sales. Author Nikki Smith received a one star rating on Amazon for her book Look What you Made me Do. The review read (spoiler alert) “I loved this book up until the author killed Buddy, the dog. How quickly a 5 star rating can diminish. Enough said.”

My strong advice to all authors is to think long and hard before killing a furry friend and, if you do decide to go ahead, be prepared. My advice to readers is, if you are concerned about the possible death of a dog, or any animal, in books, film or TV, then consult the website doesthedogdie.com.

Then you’ll never need to spend a car journey with weeping children again. Unless your actual dog dies, of course.

(No animals were harmed in the writing of this article.)

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How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley is available via Pamela Dorman Books.