Evil Detecting Dog / Live-Action TV

• Parodied in 30 Rock. Tracy attempted to invoke this trope with his Rottweiler by training it to attack white-colored creatures, his logic being that since ghosts are typically depicted as pale white it would make the dog attack ghosts. The actual result was a dog that attacks white people on sight, including poor Kenneth who gets chased across New York by the thing.
• On All My Children, Harold the dog is the only one to sense who psycho Janet Green really is. Both when she disguises herself as her sister Natalie and when she returns to town under a new identity after Magic Plastic Surgery, he is shown relentlessly barking and growling at her.
• Subverted in Battlestar Galactica (2003), when Cylon D'Anna is quite pleased that Jake the dog doesn't react with hostility to her. Of course, little does she know that Jake serves La Résistance in another way.
  • Played straight in the original series with robot-Daggit Muffet, who could "sniff" out Cylons and cannibalistic aliens.
• A light version of this appears in NCIS when Kate is reluctant to adopt a dog whose owner has died... until it growls at her Handsome Lech colleague who's always making unwelcome moves on her.
  • In the episode "Seek", Dex the military dog starts growling the moment he realizes he's in the presence of the man who murdered his handler in the opening sequence.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Pack", Xander's possession by a hyena spirit is detected by a pig. Justified in that he later eats the pig.
  Buffy: He scared the pig! [Giles looks at her] ...Well, he did...
• Charmed (1998):
  • In Prue's penultimate appearance, she is changed into a dog so she can detect the cries of a Banshee (who, by the way, is a possessed Phoebe) and lead Piper to her.
  • They also used to have an Evil Detecting Cat which hisses at and has been known to run from evil beings and demons, especially those trying to fool their way into the Halliwell household by appearing mortal. The "cat" comes back in a later episode, revealing herself to have actually been a human in cat form the entire time.
  • Subverted in "They're Everywhere" when the cat appears to hiss at Piper's new love interest. She worries this is a sign that he's secretly a warlock, but then it turns out the cat was just hissing at a hornet's nest on the wall behind him.
• Daredevil (2015): In Season 3 Episode 11, the NYPD and FBI bring search dogs into the church to look for Matt and Karen, who are hiding in the basement. One of the dogs comes up to Dex, whose scent is all over the place from the attack he just committed on the church, prompting him to say, "Not me, fellas. The bad guys."
• On Dexter (and the novels it's (loosely) based on), animals in general and dogs in particular can't tolerate the presence of the main character (a sociopathic serial killer). It's so bad that when he tried to keep a pet turtle it starved to death rather than come out of its shell when he fed it.
  • There's a dog that seems rather fond of Trinity in the fourth season, though.
• In Dickensian, Miss Havisham's dog growls whenever Compeyson approaches. Eventually, he gets rid of the dog by throwing it in the river in a sack.
• On The Dukes of Hazzard, Roscoe's dog, Flash, is very quiet and only barks at Boss Hogg. This became a plot point when Boss Hogg's ''good'' twin came to town, and Flash was used to prevent Boss from stealing his inheritance.
• In The Event, dogs bark at the aliens, who are otherwise indistinguishable from humans.
• In the Lifetime Movie of the Week Fatal Lessons: The Good Teacher, the not-good teacher is greeted with hostility by the family dog when she arrives to act as a nanny for the children (and later a cook). Her overall goal is to kill the wife and sexually torture the husband. The teacher, being something of a Mad Scientist, kills the dog by injecting it with a poison she concocted herself; she then buries the corpse and allows the family to think the dog ran away.
• Happened several times in Forever Knight. A dog and a horse both reacted negatively to vampiric presences.
• In one episode Frasier invites his ex-wife Lilith to Thanksgiving dinner at the last minute. Shortly afterwards Daphne returns home and has to drag Eddie through the front door by his leash.
  Daphne: Well, he was perfectly fine until a block from here. Then he started whining and trembling, like he senses an earthquake or a dark force or- hello, Lilith - a vortex of evil. [pauses as she realises what she just said]
• Game of Thrones: The Direwolves, with maybe Lady as the sole exception. Ghost alerts Jon to the wight in Castle Black, Summer giving Jojen a Licked by the Dog moment leads Bran to trust him, and Grey Wind is very restless in his kennel just before the Red Wedding begins.
• The Goes Wrong Show: The episode "90 Degrees" has Ruffles, the family dog, who would growl whenever he was near Renee (Vanessa) or Barbara (Sandra). Shame that said dog was voiced by Robert.
• On The Golden Girls, Blanche discovers her current boyfriend cavorting with Rose's sister when the dog that they've been watching for a neighbor comes out into the living room carrying the man's pants. After being told off by an infuriated Blanche, the abashed man goes to get his pants and leave, only to be barked at and chased out of the house by the equally angry dog.
• Heroes:
  • Played with. Mr. Muggles always seems to know which characters shouldn't be trusted, but being that he's a tiny Pomeranian, there's not much he can do and he seemed to like a disguised Sylar and Revenge!Ted.
  • Played more straight in a deleted scene when Sylar has Claire trapped in a closet and Mr. Muggles goes mad barking at him but gets flicked out the doggie door for his trouble.
• Himmelsdalen: Luck, a dog in the sanitorium, barks at Siri but likes Helena. Siri, it turns out, is a dangerous sociopath, quite unlike Helena. Luck also dislikes Raymond, another dangerous sociopath.
• In Hotel Beau Séjour, horses can apparently sense Kato even though most humans can't see her. When she gets Buried Alive, the nearby horses start pawing at the spot where she was buried, alerting the farmers.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding", Charlie's horse panics when it's near Claudia, so it can instinctively sense that she's a predator.
• Subverted all the time on It Takes a Thief (2005) — the big, mean-looking dog the family owns as a thief deterrent is much more likely to approach the thief in a friendly manner or run away whimpering.
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker. An evil pyromaniac ghost kills a man in his apartment through Spontaneous Human Combustion. When the ghost leaves the apartment, a dog in the corridor outside detects his presence and starts barking like crazy.
• At the end of the Legends of Tomorrow episode "The Eggplant, the Witch and the Wardrobe," a dog starts snarling at Ray, who's surprised because animals usually like him. He then walks off whistling Neron's leitmotif, revealing that he's fallen victim to Demonic Possession.
• MA Dtv had the one-off "Smith Comma John — Human Being for President" ads, one of which had him introduce Nilly, a golden lab who barked every time he tried to pet her.
• The Magicians (2016): Variant. When Alice finds out she's being tracked by a lamprey, she buys a cat, paying special attention to its age, and starts carrying it around in a cage everywhere she goes. When the lamprey gets near, it starts hissing until it explodes in a bloody mess. She drops the cage and runs, leaving Quentin and the others to talk to a very confused cop.
  Quentin: Sorry, officer, a friend's cat was sick... and exploded. You know, like they do.
• Not really evil detecting, but in My Own Worst Enemy the family dog is the only one who can tell when its owner's hard-edged split personality takes over.
• In The Nanny, while C.C. wasn't evil (supposedly), she was a full-blooded Rich Bitch, and her Pomeranian Chester had no trouble letting her know it. He would snarl and growl every time she was anywhere near him, while being perfectly friendly to everybody else in the house. In real life, despite Lauren Lane (C.C.) being a very sweet and pleasant person, Chester was Fran Drescher's real life dog, and was so fiercely loyal to her that any time Lane picked up the dog, he would just naturally growl, so they wrote it into the story that way.
• On Once Upon a Time, Dr. Hopper's dog, Pongo, is a well-behaved and sweet Dalmatian. But once Regina, the former Evil Queen, waltzes into their office, the dog starts growling at her and gets frozen for his trouble. That's because it's really Regina's mother Cora in disguise as her daughter. Pongo was previously shown being well-behaved around the real Regina.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Stranded", Kevin Buchanan's German Shepherd Cody takes an instant dislike to Tyr'Nar while Kevin is completely taken in by his manipulations. Tyr'Nar solves the problem and satisfies his appetite by eating Cody.
• Part of Me: After Elena kills Mónica, nobody at the manor thinks her as anything but a dutiful niece, except for Mónica's pet dog Pacho who can somehow feel Elena's Killing Intent towards Emiliana and keeps barking and roaring at her, and even tries to bite her.
• Subverted in Prison Break. The dog begins barking at Haywire and then follows him down the road after he steals supplies from the camping store. It turns out the dog wanted the jerky in his backpack.
• Invoked in Psych. Shawn is trying to fake a haunting in a house, and uses an electronic silent dog whistle to make a homeowner's dog start barking angrily. He then claims the dog is sensing an evil presence.
• In Reaper, the first sign that The Devil has taken possession of Sam's soul is that dogs suddenly hate him.
• The Rising: Dogs and birds can sense Neve as a ghost, something which nearly all humans are incapable of. She leads people to her body this way, since the family dog follows her to the lake where birds circle above its location.
• In the TV adaptation of Scream, the opening victim Nina threatens the killer (whom she thinks is her boyfriend Tyler playing a prank on her) by telling him that she has a "trained attack Pomeranian, and she will gut you on command!" Her little dog does bark at the killer from behind the glass, but it does Nina little good when she's being stabbed to death.
• Smallville:
  • "Labyrinth": Shelby starts to bark in the presence of a phantom.
  • "Veritas": Shelby starts barking when Brainiac drops by.
• Spaced: Parodied. A subplot concerns an anarchist who trained a dog to sense and attack rich people... Then he won the lottery and was immediately mauled by his own dog.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • "The Man Trap" has an evil-detecting plant — an animated alien plant in the botany lab whines and shrinks away from the salt vampire disguised as a human.
    • In "The Trouble with Tribbles", Tribbles can detect disguised Klingons.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise: Captain Archer's dog barks when a web-like alien passes in the conduits overhead. He also becomes spooked just before a Negative Space Wedgie manifests inside Enterprise herself.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Inverted in "Ex Post Facto". Tom Paris is accused of murder, and in the flashback scene the dog barks at him on sight. However, the dog barks at all strangers, and Tuvok uses this to reveal the real killer, who's familiar with the house despite claiming otherwise.
• Supernatural:
  • Invoked when Sam uses this trope to explain why a dog keeps barking at a house where a supernatural event has happened. It's never proved on screen, though.
  • A subtle version in "Live Free or Twi Hard". When Dean is infected with vampire blood and is trying not to bite his love interest, a dog can be heard barking somewhere in the distance as he starts to go all fang-y.
  • Subverted in "All Dogs Go to Heaven". Sam and Dean are interrogating a man suspected of being a shapeshifter. The moment he enters the room, his own dog barks at him and the brothers exchange a Meaningful Look. Turns out the dog is the shapeshifter, and the man his next victim.
• Sweet Home (2020): Bom the Pomeranian is usually reliable for noticing danger.
• In Tales of the Gold Monkey, Jake's one-eyed dog Jack growls or barks at any impostor, including the (unknown-to-the-characters) resident Nazi spy.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:
  • Dogs detecting Cameron as a Terminator react with dread.
    Carlos: Something about your friend I should know?
    Sarah: Cat person.
  • Played for Laughs when Cameron goes to a computer convention and a robot dog barks at her.
• In the first episode of True Blood, a dog barks at resident Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Bill Compton.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "The Hunt", an agent of the Devil is trying to lure a recently-deceased Hyder Simpson into entering Hell. Hyder's dog Rip growls, warning him not to enter, and he avoids the trap. Later, an angel remarks "...a man, well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open. But not even the Devil can fool a dog!"
  • In "Little Girl Lost", the Millers' dog Mack starts barking after Tina vanishes. When he's let inside, Mack runs under the bed and finds her in the other dimension.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • In "Teacher's Aide", Miss Peters' dog Muffin barks at her after she is possessed by the spirit of a gargoyle because he can sense that there is something very wrong with her.
  • In "Stranger in Possum Meadows", the Wilkins' dog Biff barks at Scout, who is an alien who intends to take Danny back to his planet for study. Scout uses his power over animals to quieten Biff and later takes the dog as a specimen. Although he eventually releases Danny, Biff is not so lucky.
• War of the Worlds (1988): In "Amongst the Philistines", Kensington and Mrs. Pennyworth buy a dog just in time to have it react badly to Adrian, a few scenes before he turns out to be an alien. The trope is pretty blatant here, as the dog was introduced in this scene, and is never seen (alive) again.
• Inverted in Wolf Like Me. A brief gag indicates that dogs can sense that Mary is a werewolf, but rather than fear and/or anger they're intrigued, breaking from their leashes in the park to walk with her. On the other hand, it's played straight with Sarah's cat, who hisses and yowls at the sight of Mary.
• Xena: Warrior Princess had Argo, her trusty horse that could tell something was wrong when Xena's body was hi-jacked by Callisto's spirit.
• The X-Files: In "Terma", Soviet assassin Peskow manages to upset all the horses in a stable by calmly observing one of them. Though for all we know it was part of his plan.

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