Why Must Dogs Never Die in Books?
Damyanti Biswas
Is the death of a dog in a story a deal-breaker for you, even if it is essential to the story, and a reflection of reality? Why must a dog never die in books?
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Damyanti Biswas
In a book group the other day, a reader brought up the question: why must dogs never die in books? And that made me think of my first book, You Beneath Your Skin. In that novel, there’s a puppy, and while Simon & Schuster India had zero issues with a scene in the book, the first thing my US agent spoke of while prepping the book for other publishers was that scene with the puppy. The scene has since been tweaked.

I’ve been a lifelong dog lover and my family has only ever rescued dogs. My fiction has never included dogs other than that particular one, and that only because the novel is very realistic, and that scene didn’t seem out of place in that specific context.

It’s also worth noting that my (now-ex) British agent didn’t have anything to say about it at all. It is only since I’ve been interacting with the US audience and US books that I’ve come to realize that the US audience will accept gratuitous violence against women, against men, the elderly, and often, even children.

If a dog dies in the book, however, that’s the end of the book, and the author.

I don’t think there should be gratuitous violence against any animal or human, but very unfortunately violence is a part of human nature. If a particular genre of fiction is meant to imitate reality, it is strange that violence against pets, which is at least as common as violence against humans, is taboo.

It’s been said that readers can’t take violence towards dogs as these animals represent all that is innocent and loyal, and that dogs don’t have a voice. A dog or puppy is seen as a creature that can be tortured without fear of major repercussions. After all, the punishment for killing a dog is much lower than that of killing a human, and is not a capital offence (in countries that haven’t abolished it).

A dog that dies in a book (that is otherwise filled with violence of all kinds) remains a deal-breaker.

I’m not judging those for whom it is a deal-breaker, and those for whom it isn’t.

As a writer, I’m merely curious as to why.

My speculation (based on no proof whatsoever) is that it might boil down to an issue of control and scale.

We can all do something about violence against animals, whereas violence against humans needs to be dealt with differently for our psychological well-being. We harden ourselves to violence against humans, because to bear it in reality and fiction, we need to see it as ‘unreal.’ In some cases, the scale of violence against humans is too mind-boggling–war is horrific, but it can be seen as generalized depravity and horror, not individual. In others, violence against fellow-humans is seen as ‘fictitious’ because it is so far removed from what is possible in the reader’s humdrum life. It provides escape by making readers care and worry about a fictitious being (but not too much), thus taking the reader away from the everyday anxieties of their own lives.

Women (the majority of readers) who read super-violent fiction where women’s bodies are splattered on walls, claim to ‘have no triggers’. Some of them think of it as a ‘warning to learn from’. Walking into a dark parking lot while being unaware of your surroundings, or not checking the back seat of your car or entering a home where the dark front door is already open are seen as scenarios to learn from. That’s how the killer gets you.

As well, a ‘murderer’ is on a different scale than an ‘animal abuser’—many will confront the latter straightaway, but may not feel able to confront the former. So we turn away from what seems avoidable. Animal abuse, though very common, seems more shameful, because we, as individuals, should be able to get a handle on it. Animals are cute, innocent beings, and we ought to be able to protect them–at least in our fiction, if not reality. I see very successful authors with very graphic violence against women in their books who take pains to tell readers that the dog is not harmed. They understand their audience.

We can demand that a dog not be harmed, but it takes a lot/ something different for us to demand that a human not be harmed–because so much fiction is either a warning on how humans can come to harm, or a safe way to experience certain emotions that are often not found in a reader’s real life.