‘The most emotional terrorism in a movie I’ve ever seen’: Why does an animal’s death on film affect us so deeply?

For Victoria Álvarez, Marley & Me (2008) was worse than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — pure horror. She saw it on a streaming platform, inspired by its cheery thumbnail of Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, who star in the rom-com alongside a labrador named Marley. Indeed, Álvarez found the classic comedy entertaining and sweet — until Marley got sick.

Nothing too tragic happens, the dog simply gets old. But nonetheless, it was at this point that the movie turned into a nightmare for Álvarez. She hugged her pitbull close and couldn’t stop crying until the end. “When Marley can no longer go up the stairs and Wilson sleeps with him on the floor, I broke down, that is something that I’ve done myself. I couldn’t watch it again.”

She’s not the only one to hold this opinion. Careful; this paragraph contains a spoiler: “The happy-go-lucky, slobbering, joyful dog — symbolic of everything that is right with the world — fucking dies. And it’s not a quick death either, under the wheel of a bus or at the hands of an evil geneticist. It’s a slow, natural death, one that feels like it lasts half the film,” they write on Shiznit. “Worse, it works — only a man of stone could remain emotionless witnessing this cute doggie barking its last. You’ll sob but feel cheated out of every tear.”

Social media tends to erupt every time the film is broadcast. Marley & Me is perhaps the pinnacle of the “animals who die” genre, but there are many more films that belong in the category. A Dog’s Purpose (2017), the story of a dog who reincarnates several times, and The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019), which is based on the bestseller by Garth Stein, are among those that leave their viewers the most devastated. In this club one also finds Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009), which becomes a trending topic every time it airs on television.

“The most emotional terrorism in a movie I’ve ever seen,” comments one user on X. The story of the akita who waits for a professor every day in Tokyo’s Shibuya train station turns out to be intolerably sad for many viewers. Not far behind is I Am Legend, the film in which Will Smith is faithfully accompanied by a German shepherd named Samantha. “Sam’s goodbye is probably the most moving scene in a movie I’ve seen in recent years,” posts a Reddit user, to which another replies: “Seriously, I can watch human beings being fake mutilated, but as soon as animals are in danger, I’m out.”

Such comments make us wonder: why does the suffering of a fictional animal cause us more strife than the death of a person? “In the first place, it must be said that it doesn’t make us better or worse people when we suffer for this or that subject,” says psychologist Beatriz Cuervo. “Simply put, every person is sensitive to certain issues. But besides that, the ethical norms that determine our reactions are not the same when it comes to animals on two feet as for the rest of them, and although social mandates place animals in a morally inferior position, there are people and experiences that can invert that supposedly correct order.”

The subject that has even drawn scientific attention, having been analyzed by researchers at Boston’s Northeastern University and the University of Colorado. For the study, 256 students were shown four pieces of fake news about a supposed brutal attack carried out with a baseball bat. In the first, the victim was a one-year-old baby; in the second, a 30-year-old; in the third, a puppy; and finally, a six-year-old dog. The article about the baby caused the most emotional response, along with that of the puppy and the adult dog. All three generated the same amount of empathy. Not so for the 30-year-old man.

Some might find it surprising that two animals caused more emotional response than a human, but “it is easier to develop an ambivalent relationship with humans than animals, whose behavior is more predictable,” says Cuervo. “Put another way, accumulating certain experiences in this world can make it so that the more we learn about people, the more we love our dogs,” as Mark Twain put it. In Cuervo’s opinion, this can be exacerbated by our overexposure to tragic news. “It is also worth asking whether, in this age where everything is content and images flood every minute of our lives, we are not becoming somewhat desensitized to human suffering. There is something perverse and dystopian about seeing a reel from Gaza and then an abandoned puppy and then a makeup tutorial.”

If we perceive a victim as being vulnerable, our empathy will be more intense. Perhaps this is why it is such a commonly utilized resource in fiction. In fact, some directors seem quite committed to the concept. After the release of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), an apparently inoffensive film, The New Yorker asked: “Does Wes Anderson Hate Dogs?” According to the author, the death of a pooch named Snoopy from an arrow wound provoked a wave of indignation in the theater where he was watching the movie. The Washington Post defined the moment as “an excellent example of the type of darkness that lurks in Anderson’s filmography, where domestic animals are often victims of the screenwriter-director’s peculiar narrative.”

Such criticism seems strange given that in Anderson’s films, violence is scarce and sometimes even presented in a humorous way, pure slapstick. Nonetheless, even in the movies of an auteur as prone to ultra-violence as Quentin Tarantino, one never sees the mistreatment of animals. “I have a big thing about killing animals in movies,” he said during an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. “That’s a bridge I can’t cross.”

Sometimes, deaths are presented in an attempt to stun the viewer. On other occasions, they’re a resource that serves to demonstrate what a character is capable of. In the brutal series The Shield (2002-2008), a key moment comes when the honest detective “Dutch” Wagenbach strangles a kitten to be able to understand a killer, a sequence that all the actors hated and tried to get taken out of the script, but the director and the episode’s writer David Mamet insisted on including. The evil nature of Glenn Close in Damages (2007-2012) becomes clear when she collaborates in killing the dog of a witness who she wants to silence in the series pilot (Close had already boiled bunnies in Fatal Attraction). The complexities of Frank Underwood on House of Cards (2013-2018) emerges when he breaks the neck of a dog that was just run over. Was it an act of compassion or abuse?

In other moments, violence against animals serves for the viewer to take the side of a character of dubious morality. Everything goes in the world of unscrupulous killers in John Wick, but in the moment the protagonist’s puppy is murdered, you know any response by the character played by Keanu Reeves will be justified.

And the carnage isn’t limited to dogs and cats. “My biggest childhood trauma was the death of Artax on The NeverEnding Story (1984),” reveals another cinephile, Jose Antonio Ordóñez. “Trapped in quicksand — why is there so much quicksand in movies?” Sometimes, it’s not even necessary that there be a real animal involved. This journalist managed to get through nearly all the deaths on Game of Thrones with her dignity intact, but lost it viewing the end of every dire wolf and even the dragons. That, according to Cuervo, “is worthy of the story”. “We want to be told stories and, if we are identifying with the protagonist, we suffer when they suffer, even if it’s a mythological being,” she says. “When there is a tale about a character, an illustration of the character is being assembled and there are a series of qualities that make them unique, that help us to empathize with them.”

Suffering over the fate of animals in fiction is not on the decline, despite the increase in visual stimuli to which we are subjected. In fact, it is on the rise. Following the trailer for the film Good Boy, a horror movie in which a dog is the only one who can see the evil forces haunting his owner, Google searches about the dog’s final destiny in the film exploded. It seemed that many were deciding whether or not they’d see the film based on the answer.

Such spoilers are sought out by those who look to avoid heartbreak by consulting the website DoesTheDogDie.com before watching a movie. It describes itself as “your indispensable ally for emotional navigation through the vast realm of movies, TV shows, and more. We understand that certain content can be emotionally challenging, and our mission is to empower you with the knowledge needed to make informed decisions about the media you consume.” The community-run site is fed by comments from viewers, and is designed “to be your emotional survival guide,” in the words of its creators. If an animal suffering, albeit a fictitious one, can ruin your day, now you know where to click.

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