Do Dogs Know That They Will Die

It was October of ’23, and Rocco was refusing his medication again. At almost 14 years of age and in congestive heart failure, it wasn’t too unusual that he was fussy about which special snack had the pills in it.

We were planning to work on a Christmas photo shoot that day, since parading around in front of a camera was one of his favorite things to do. Christmas was still months away though, so I told myself it could wait until he got better.

He never got better.

That day marked the beginning of the end for Rocco. He refused all foods and appeared to be intentionally choosing death. While his brain was as sharp as ever, he refused to get up apart from getting a drink or going to the bathroom. After consulting with a veterinarian about his welfare, we booked an in-home euthanasia for him.

It was my first time making such a decision. It was an agonizing decision. It was the right decision. I had often wondered leading up to this how I would make the right decision when his time came, and everyone I spoke with about it said something vague like, “you’ll know.”

Somehow, they were right. Rocco made it clear he was no longer interested in living—but did he really know he was going to die? How much do dogs know about death anyway?

What the Experts Know

Susana Monsó is quite possibly the world leader in research when it comes to a respectful look at death and dying in animals. She is one of the first researchers in a relatively new field called Comparative Thanatology. Comparative Thanatology is literally the study of how animals perceive death. There is no one more likely to know the answer to my questions then her.

When I posed the question of whether dogs can understand death to her, she replied, “Whether or not dogs understand death is going to depend a lot on their own personal experiences with it, so I can’t give you a one-size-fits-all answer sadly. But hopefully you’ll find some clarity on this in my book.”

That book was the then upcoming “Playing Possum,” and it indeed held the answers I was seeking. Playing Possum sets out to answer the question of whether animals can understand death at all, and goes from there to progressively more complex concepts on death.

The book breaks down what it means to understand death, why it is unreasonable to think that animals can’t understand, and what she proposes as a minimum understanding of death.

I highly recommend anyone who is curious about this question read Playing Possum. The book is not aimed at dogs in particular, but the standards in the book can easily be applied to dogs to get a good picture.

Monsó proposes that the minimum requirements for saying an animal understands another being has died is that:

1. They should know how the deceased animal acted when it was alive.
   In order to know something is dead, you have to know what alive looks like. If your dog can’t distinguish between something that has never been alive in the first place, like a rock, and a living thing like a bird, there’s no hope for it to understand death.
2. That the deceased animal isn’t currently reacting like the animal did when it is alive.
   When something dies, it ceases all motion and doesn’t respond to anything ever again. If your dog treated a deceased animal the exact same way as a living animal, chances are they are unaware the animal is dead.
3. That the dead animal will never act like a living one again.
   Dead animals don’t come back to life. If your dog expects a rabbit they killed to suddenly bound off at any moment, it’s unlikely they’re aware of what it means to be dead.

To continue from there, she reminds us that human babies are not born with a concept of death. In order to understand death, an individual has to learn about it through experiencing the death of another creature. Since we as humans tend to hide away any sign of death promptly, the first death a child experiences is usually the death of a beloved pet.

Monsó goes on to explain that there are more aspects to understanding death than just these minimums, such as the universality of death and personal mortality. These things aren’t required for minimal understanding of death, such as a wolf knowing that the elk they just wrestled to the ground is, in fact, dead, but it is a part of death as a whole. You can read her scientific paper proposing minimum standards for scientists here.

This suggested standard gives us guidelines that help us sleuth out how much dogs know about death, starting at these minimal conditions, and moving out from there to more advanced aspects of death such as personal mortality, and whether they can grieve.

Using her minimal parameters, we can finally answer whether an individual dog, who has had experience with death, also has the cognitive power to understand what has happened.

Do Dogs Know Something Died?

Using Monsó’s guidelines, dogs certainly have the potential to understand death. They are very intelligent animals, and certainly have the cognitive power to do so. What they may lack is the chance to experience death at all.

When we, loving dog owners, have to euthanize a pet, it’s often done in a clinic setting. One day, brother Fido is there but obviously smelling sick and ill—the next he is gone. Where did he go? Lacking language to have it explained to them, most dogs search for their missing comrade because they do not know their friend has passed.

Seldom are they given a chance to interact with anything dead, let alone witness the death of another animal. They rarely get to see a passed friend’s body, and their food was never seen as a living creature before it ended up in a can or a bag.

If there’s no chance to witness death, there’s no chance to understand it. Most pets likely don’t know what death is. The exception might be hunting dogs, cadaver dogs, and hospice therapy dogs.

We reached out to John Beck, an experienced cadaver dog handler, and asked him if the cadaver dogs he worked with knew they were searching for deceased people.

He responded, “That depends. Most Human Remains Detection Dogs (Cadaver Dogs) including mine start their training on very small samples of human tissue. Those samples are usually packaged in some way to protect them from the environment and for ease of handling. Visually, it just looks like a little container of something. From that perspective, they’re just looking for scent.

Most dogs translate that to larger or more recognizable body parts without any issues. To them it’s a game, their favorite game. For the past seven or eight years I’ve worked a training seminar where we concentrate on locating full bodies. During that course, I’ve only seen one dog that had a major aversion to a recognizable full body. The dog was absolutely fine with smaller tissue samples but terrified at the concept of a recognizable dead person. The dog did acclimate a bit during the two-day course but wasn’t comfortable.”

Did this individual dog match up the smell of death, an absolutely still body, and the knowledge that humans normally walk around? It’s hard to say.

John Beck requested that I state that though I was referred to him through SARDUS, all thoughts are his own.

We also reached out to a dog hunting forum, where user Hundebartsimpson shared the behavior of his hunting dog that made him confident the dog could distinguish between living and dead.

“My dog (German Wirehaired Pointer) will point at live, uninjured game birds. She absolutely will not try to retrieve them. She will not point at a dead bird. She will chase down and retrieve a wounded bird. On a few occasions a dead bird has landed near a live bird and she held point on the live bird rather than retrieve the shot bird”

As a bird dog, it’s clear she has a lot of experience with death. She knows that there is no point in trying to retrieve a live bird, that dead birds can be retrieved, and that injured birds may need to be chased first. This is a strong indicator that she understands the difference between living and dead.

It’s understandable though, that many dogs may not make this leap. Without the full experience of death (seeing the animal living, seeing it die, seeing it fail to live again) as the pointer has had, there’s little chance of a dog developing an understanding for what death is.

Dogs, after all, don’t have the elaborate language skills or writing systems that humans have. Without firsthand experience, they can’t really hope to gain understanding.

Since it is so individual, I decided to ask the dog community at large about the one type of death a dog is more likely to experience—the death of a friend.

What the Dog Community Knows

I reached out to the people of Reddit, and asked the dog community three questions:

If you have ever had a pup who passed away, do you think they were aware that they were dying?

Did any surviving dogs understand if they had a friend who died?

Do you think dogs know that they will die one day, even when they’re young and healthy?

The response was immediate and powerful. Over 300 people responded with stories of their late dogs at the end of their life. Mostly these were older dogs, but some were young dogs dying suddenly. Almost every owner reported that they felt their dogs “knew” about their upcoming death, if they were sick, severely injured, or very old.

The stories are many and varied but include dogs who normally hate the vet being calm and accepting of them, looking around as if to memorize their house, and seeking out their family if a sudden death was about to occur.

Although this could perhaps be explained away in some other sense, such as a dog seeking comfort or being too sick to respond to a frightening place, clearer are stories of dogs left behind. Only two dogs did not seem to grieve a lost friend, a very young puppy and one that did not have an apparent reason.

They grieved through howling, lying near bodies, and reduction in playing and eating. Dogs who got to see the body of their friend did not search for their partners, but dogs who did not get a chance to see the body would often search for weeks.

Studies are just now beginning to look into dogs that grieve, with a 2022 study finding that they did, indeed, appear to grieve.  In the study, a staggering 86.6% of dogs showed some symptom after the loss of a friend that could be considered grief.

But do dogs know that they will die some day?

There’s good evidence that some dogs at least can tell the difference between the living and the dead. Can they, upon seeing their friends or even their prey die, eventually come to realize that they will one day also perish?

It’s unlikely that a normal, healthy dog is thinking about old age or eventual death as they go about their next game of fetch. Dogs live in the moment after all, and while they can certainly remember the past and sometimes plan for the future, they much prefer to think in terms of “now.”

Dr. Griffin, in his book, “The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary continuity of mental experience,” cautions against assuming that animals don’t know they will die one day. He writes, “[Researchers] state without qualification that man is the only animal that can be aware of his own future death. But I suggest that we pause and ask just how anyone knows this. What sort of evidence is available either pro or con?. (…) The available negative evidence supports at most an agnostic position.”

Old age and illness aren’t the only reason dogs die. They can also die from injury. Evidence for dogs being able to perceive the possibility of death through injury is there, at least anecdotally. One of the users participating in my discussion noted this with the following account:

“I know my old dog for sure understood that either death or serious injury was a possibility. We did a lot of backpacking and when we would come to a sketchy area or maybe a dangerous crossing (like one ledge to another) not only was he hella hesitant but he would grip onto me for dear life as we crossed the chasm or whatever we were doing. He absolutely understood that he was in danger of something and I fully believe that something is the fear of death.”

Many people seem to believe that their older dogs also “know” when they are about to pass. These dogs typically try to leave the home and wander away from it shortly before they die. Rocco did this often his last day when ever he went out to go potty. He didn’t mind being fetched back, but he also really seemed to want to wander out into the fields.

Other dogs, especially if they were dying from traumatic injury, such as from eating cooked chicken bones, go to their owner seeking help shortly before passing.

These may be signs they know the end is near—or it could be they are confused or afraid. It’s possible that some of these individuals know, or simply that they are following an instinct or are seeking comfort in a time of great pain.

Circling back to my story of Rocco, I do believe that he knew his body was beyond repair and that there was no hope in recovery. He wanted it to be over. Did he know that “over” was death? I am not sure.

Right now, comparative thanatology is in its infancy. We are only just beginning to notice that animals have far more cognitive power, emotional intelligence, and understanding than we’ve given them credit for in the past.

As we learn more about what it means to be a dog, we may be able to answer questions like these better. What we do know however, is that at least some dogs understand what death is, in its most basic form.

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