‘They are reunited in Heaven’: dog dies after going on two-day hunger strike following owner’s death
- In its final moments, the dog trekked to a renovated house the old man had wanted to see and died there
- The dog reportedly spent two days laying next to the man’s coffin, not eating or drinking
Yingjie Wang in BeijingPublished: 9:00am, 20 Aug, 2022
A dog in southwest China died this week after it went on a hunger strike for two days following its master’s death from an illness, according to the man’s granddaughter.
The village dog who was over 10 years old had accompanied the old man since it was a puppy. It spent its final two days laying next to the coffin, not eating, drinking or even moving.
In its final moments, the dog also fulfilled a dying wish of its owner by visiting a family home that the man’s oldest son had recently renovated, which the grandfather had wanted to see before he died.
“The dog then went to my family’s old house and died there, which was also my grandfather’s unfulfilled wish,” the granddaughter, surnamed Sun, said.
Sun also said that the dog died on her grandfather’s birthday, a coincidence that led many people to say it made them “believe in fate”.
Online, one person commented: “The dog was afraid that the grandpa would be too lonely by himself in Heaven, so he went to keep him company.”
The story went viral on the mainland Chinese internet, garnering 230 million views on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, as of Friday morning.
Many people shared their experiences with their dogs.
“My grandfather passed away on the 13th, and his dog did not sleep after that,” a person shared. “The dog eventually fell asleep while lying on one of my grandpa’s clothes, which my grandmother had taken out and laid on the floor.”
Another commented: “They are reunited in Heaven and will be together forever.”
Following the Lunar New Year last year, another dog named “Big Yellow”, an eight-year-old dog, sneaked out of his new master’s house and ran 40km back to the village where his old owner lived. The incident drew comparisons from Chinese people to the famous 2009 film Hachi: A Dog’s Tale starring Richard Gere.
In May this year, a similar incident happened when a Shibu Inu ran 8km to return to its old owner after the woman had to give the dog up because her asthma was getting worse due to the dog’s hair.
The owner estimated it probably took the dog two hours to trek back to its original home. The woman interpreted the moment as a sign and built a new dog pen so she could keep it for the remainder of its life.
In 2013, a dog in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, spent all of its days searching buses that stopped at a familiar stop after its owner went missing. Bus staff said it had been searching the buses for two weeks.
https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/tr...obox=1660957318
