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Blogs by Cynthia A. Buhain-Baello
Dogs Howl When Someone Dies 5/4/2009 11:39:53 PM
Dogs have been our family pets for years, and our neighbors too are owners of dogs. My personal experience with canine friends have been long and mutually satisfying, affection and loyalty-wise. From childhood, I have observed this unique sensibility among dogs - regarding death. When my brother died last March, our neighbors' dogs kept howling through the night, and I knew someone was going to die. Before dawn my brother passed away.
Last Monday night, the dogs in our neighborhood howled again; long mournful, sad and heart-wrenching howls that make one's hair stand on edge. I felt the chill and the foreboding thought that someone again will pass away, but who it was, I did not know. Tuesday morning, my email came with the news: "Daddy passed away, 7:45 a.m. Sydney time, 4:45 a.m. Philippine time." It was dawn, at the time I heard the dogs.
When I was twelve, my grandmother who had a stroke, also passed away as dogs all over the neighborhood howled in unison upon her last breath. The sky drizzled with very fine rain and the night was dark, bleak, and dreary.
Before the death of someone in a family or within the neighborhood, dogs seem to "announce" the coming of the Angel of Death. It makes me wonder, do they have a sixth sense that we humans have never observed before?
