[Alma T. C. Boykin]
*Unless you really need to.
I still regret not killing the dog. Rada ni Drako, in the first version of the story, killed the dog. It was threatening her, might have been rabid, and she needed for no one to know that she was there. My editor balked at the idea that she’d kill the “harmless animal” out of hand. Plus it would be off-putting to readers. So I re-wrote it so that she just stunned the dog. Looking back, it would have been more effective at showing the tensions and complexity of her personality if she’d killed the dog, then saved the child.
The most effective “killed the dog” in recent memory is the first John Wick story/movie. The hit squad is sent to get John Wick’s car and beat him up, but kills his dog instead. Or rather, his late wife’s dog that was his link to her memory and their past. Biiiiig mistake. Other films pointedly save the dog/cat, including the original RoboCop, where the hitman lures the minor bad guy’s cat out of the house and takes her with him just before the house blows up. “Don’t kill the dog.”
One reason this came to mind was a complaint I read about Hollywood tossing away beloved characters, or killing off nice characters/creatures just for emotion points. Yes, that’s happened in the past and will in the future. Revenge is one of the oldest motivators in the book (see the story of King David’s dis-functional family for examples). Eliminate the protagonist or villain’s ties to a place or person, and they are free to act, forced to act, or driven to act. (See the novel The Blood is the Life) But it has a point. There is a reason for the deaths and suffering, and what comes out of it 1) is needed by the plot and 2) wasn’t done just for emotional hits. What this person complained about was sloppy, lazy writing that used shock for emotional points in a way that had nothing to do with the story. In other words, they’re killing the dog just to kill the dog, not to set-up the entire rest of the plot arc, or because the dog was rabid, or because the real bad-guy had hidden a bomb in the dog, or something.
I can handle a lot of pain and violence in a story if it has a purpose and is later redeemed. Sometimes the dog has to die, in which case it had better be quickly and painlessly. In one of the SERRAted Edge novels, Mercedes Lackey uses a flashback of the bad-guy’s father killing a puppy in a way that explains why the bad guy is so hideously warped to the point that (IIRC) he refuses redemption. He later gets what he deserve. I did not care for that part of the book. I also did not care for that plot arc in general. It strikes me now as one of the weaker books in that series, for that and other reasons*.
Don’t kill the dog (or cat, or iguana, or lemur, or mongoose, or Cape Hunting Dog {the Cape Buffalo? probably deserved it}) unless there is a good, compelling, necessary reason to do so. There might be one. Make absolutely certain that the reader gets that, sees it clearly, and understands why the dog is deceased. Don’t bump off beloved characters unless there is a very good story reason. You may still lose readers, or hear vehemently from unhappy readers, but more will understand.
Image Source: Image by Adriana Morales from Pixabay
*Too much happens on-screen, along with some thematic problems. I do better with things happening off-screen and alluded to. My imagination will all-too-happily fill in the gory/horrible details.
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “Don’t Shoot the Dog*”
Gratuitous slaying/torture of pets or children in a book is a wall-impact event for me. If it is an integral point of the plot, or a memory, or a character foundational event, well then I can go with it. But sadism just for emotional shock value doesn’t depress me, it angers me — it makes me want to find someone responsible in the real world that I can… reason with, hard.
I’m hard on my protagonists, sometimes, but they aren’t innocents and they grow in the process. Bit players are different. If the dog has to die, make it meaningful. If the child has to suffer, spare us the details. I hold the author responsible for the torture of innocents who are, by definition, not “sinners in the hands of an angry God”.
There are several reasons I’m not fond of the Horror genre, but the opening it provides for the sanctioned and sometimes casual destruction of innocents (as opposed to the deserving) provides too many opportunities for sadism.
Oh yes. It has to be relevant to the plot. I’d argue that it has to be more clearly relevant to the plot than other formative events, because it is so horrifying.
I once met, as a child (8?), a neighborhood boy my age from a wealthy family (parents never home, servants) who gave off an odd vibe I couldn’t understand. For a few weeks, I made him a casual playmate.
I have a still-vivid recollection of the time I once found him calmly wheeling his bicycle back and forth over a not-yet-dead robin in his driveway, to see what would happen.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up as if I had just met a monster in the woods, and I backed away, never to return. Some forms of psychopathy you can just smell — they have a visceral effect that goes back to our primate origins.
I stopped reading Katherine Kurtz after a four year old boy was tortured and murdered in one of her books. I agree that the boy had to die, for plot purposes, but hitting him on the head and throwing him in the well would have been enough.
Other appearance in movies: “What Just Happened,” in which the killing of Sean Penn’s dog is likely to torpedo the success of the movie being made. The director refuses to take that scene out, because he wants to be true to the movie, or art, or other something something.
It turns out there are several novels titled “The Blood is the Life”. Did you mean the one by David Carrico last year?
Yes, that’s the one.
in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, one of the key scenes is the father shooting the (dangerously rabid) dog.
Possibly rabid. They aren’t sure. There’s one character who mutters afterward about it.
For me, the most affecting scene in the old True Grit is Mattie’s horse collapsing and dying on its own and a frustrated, despairing Rooster(1) having to carry the snakebit Mattie on foot from there. The equivalent scene in the newer version, where Rooster stabs the horse to keep it going (time is of the essence to treat poisonous snakebite) and then shoots it when it drops, is (heh) grittier and probably more true to the period, but doesn’t actually add to the pathos.
(1)People dismiss the Duke’s Oscar win as a pity award based on his battle with cancer; this scene is one of the reasons I disagree.
Absolute agreement on the death of Mattie’s horse. It manages to convey sad necessity and pathos simultaneously, and one swallows hard watching it.
Arguably a big factor in the success of A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones was Martin’s willingness to shoot the dog even when it wasn’t strictly necessary, and he had left himself an escape clause. “This is new, this is exciting, no one is safe!” said all the fans. But arguably a big factor in why everything stalled is the fact that the novelty of that trick wore off within a few books, and when everyone you care about is dead, what’s left but a bunch of horrible people doing horrible things to each other?
Respect cliches. Cliches are old and wise and powerful. Nothing gets to be a cliche until it’s overused, which means it’s used a lot, which means there’s a reason for it. Merely undermining it does not produce something else to serve that purpose.
I made it through the first half of the second book before I gave up on it. Too much “shooting the dog” for my taste.
Shooting Old Yellar on page 1 is a no go. Shooting him on page 188 is okay. It is when and why which is important.
Yes, but I still think it’s too dark for 10-year-olds.
My evil mind immediately went to the condensed version: “Old (BLAM!) Yeller. The end.”
To the point, though, I agree that nihilism in literature has little or nothing to recommend it. When something bad happens the audience needs to know why and, most importantly, its effect on the characters.
There’s also practical marketing considerations: there are enough people who hate the animal dying that this is, indeed, a thing:
https://www.doesthedogdie.com/
Don’t bump off beloved characters unless there is a very good story reason.
Or the beloved character’s wife. I’ve forgotten the series, but our intrepid hero’s wife is killed by a terrorist (blown out into space) in the last chapter of book when-I-caught-up-to-the-author. It wasn’t entire gratuitous – the terrorists had good reason to hate the hero – but the placement! We barely get the hero’s reaction and the book is over. I never went back. The reviews were scathing.