Pedigree chums: why the movies are killing off fewer dogs

There was a time, not so long ago, when watching a film was a clearcut experience. There would be a good guy and a bad guy, and you would know who the bad guy was because they would shoot a dog in the face.

It happened more times than you might expect. Mad Max 2, dog gets shot. Revenge, dog gets shot. Turner & Hooch, dog gets shot. Red, dog gets shot. Man with the Gun, dog gets shot. Badlands, dog gets shot. Dog Soldiers, you’ll never guess.

But how things change. These days – thanks to either political correctness gone mad or basic human decency or whatever – dogs are much less likely to be murdered in films.

A study by (of course) pet insurance firm Lassie has discovered that the number of dogs that die in movies dropped by a whopping 80% between 2020 and 2025. It reports that six years ago, 10 of the 100 highest-grossing films featured a dog dying either on or off screen. But by 2025, this number fell to just two.

Now, this could be down to any number of reasons. The first, and possibly most important, is that cinema finds itself in a perilous position. The future of the entire medium is at stake and every dollar counts, so why risk alienating a swathe of the audience by gratuitously offing a pup? Things are so bad that there is an entire website – Does the Dog Die? – purely to warn viewers of any enjoyment-spoiling canine fatalities.

In fact, we may have become so sensitive to animal-related deaths onscreen that it has been offered as one potential reason for the Digger flop. After all, the film’s trailer heavily focused on Digger’s sick cat as it was given a terminal diagnosis. Now obviously it was a deliberately bad animatronic prop cat, but that didn’t stop large numbers of Does the Dog Die?’s users from warning people of its death.

So nervous are we as an audience that film-makers cannot even make dog movies without explicitly reassuring us that the animals are going to make it out OK. As early as June, Richard Raymond – the producer of Brad Pitt’s new canine movie Heart of the Beast – took to social media to literally spoil the ending of his own film, just to set our minds at rest, tweeting: “The dog does not die. You’re welcome.”

And then there’s Anne Hathaway, whose film The End of Oak Street concerns a family, a dog, and a very hungry T rex. During promotion for the (12A) film, Hathaway tacitly managed to reassure audiences that the dog wasn’t going to become dino chow, by stating that “I feel like movies that kill dogs should automatically be rated R.”

Of course, however, this leads me to suspect that Anne Hathaway hasn’t actually watched all of her films. Her highest-grossing of the year was Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which features a dog death so absolutely gratuitous that it legitimately borders on slapstick. In short, a dog gets hurled off a cliff. Is it central to the story? No, it isn’t even remotely peripheral to the story. It’s just a thing that happens. The sun rises. The sun sets. John Leguizamo lobs a puppy off the side of a cliff.

Obviously Hathaway is wrong here. An automatic R-rating for a dog death would change the texture of films as we know them. In Turner & Hooch, Hooch’s death was the entire point of the movie. Did it permanently traumatise a generation of children who thought they had signed up for a funny dog flick? Yes. But did it also work to brace us better against the cruel realities of the world? Also yes.

And perhaps that’s what we all need. We live in deeply uncertain times, and sometimes it feels like we still aren’t fully prepared for the horrors that await us. So ask yourself this: is this the right time to cosset ourselves away from things that upset us, or is it time that film-makers started to act responsibly again by killing as many dogs as they possibly can? It doesn’t matter what sort of film it is, whether it’s a drama or a horror or a Paw Patrol cartoon. Let’s impose a mandatory canine death quota to toughen us up again.

Who’s with me? Nobody? What if it was just Paw Patrol, then? What if it was just Chase from Paw Patrol? Still no? Suit yourselves.