Wednesday OT – The Dog Dies at the End (Or the Beginning)

I started this book decades ago, but within the first few pages I read that the dogs had died prior to the telling and the now grown-up man was reminiscing and grieving. I closed the book right away:

1961, Doubleday & Co., cover art by Reisie Lonette

I still don't know what happens in that one. I assume raccoons were hunted, the boy's hounds bayed a lot, and the dogs died peacefully in their sleep, boy got new dogs. That's it. THE END, okay? At least Rawls warned you right off the bat, unlike that no-good Gipson, who launched millions of children into direct confrontation with the void.

Better yet is Sounder by William Armstrong. Sounder, the eponymous dog, gets to live his natural lifespan and goes gently into the night at the end, IIRC. I don't remember Jim Kjelgaard or Albert Terhune's dog stories being particularly heartbreaking. I was rooting for Cujo to get everyone in that annoying town.

I enjoyed Dan Simmons's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, but when Endymion, the sequel, started with one of the John Keats clones (sci-fi Simmons is the best Simmons, don't you think?) struggling for survival on a hostile planet with his dog, I knew the dog was going to die. And when it did (between pp 50 –100, I think), e'er so poetically, e'er so elegiacally described as is Simmons's wont, I dropped the book right back into the TBR stack. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy also has animal deaths within the first fifty pages. A wolf gets caught in a trap and its mate won't leave and both are killed. That was probably the most recent dog/wolf RIP book I relegated to the Maybe Later pile.

Dog and cat deaths in books and movies aren't necessarily a deal breaker for me, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood. 

Any books or movies you couldn't finish because of emotionally manipulative animal deaths? And are there any fictional animal deaths which aren't emotionally manipulative?