Evil Detecting Dog / Literature

• In the first Animorphs book, the first hint that something's not right with Tom is when Jake morphs into a dog and smells something unsettling.
• Inverted in The Belgariad, birds seem to instinctively know (and love) Polgara, even if they've never met her. The Emperor's bird even chews him out for not recognizing her.
• Both Can Be True: A few months ago, Ash, who was presenting as a girl at the time, had a crush on Tyler, who had just moved into their old apartment complex. Ash's dog Booper growled at him, but Ash was attracted to him anyway. When Tyler found out Ash was genderfluid, he and some local bullies jumped them before school, pinned them to the ground, and poured purple Gatorade up their nose.
• The Brotherhood of the Conch: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, the palace horses and elephants are all badly spooked by a Searcher, an invisible, soulless being designed to capture and trap a specific person. The only person who understands the animals' reaction is the powerful magician Abhaydatta.
• In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel", one of the first signs something is not right with Lady Geraldine is the untypical reaction of the dog: "The mastiff old did not awake,/ Yet she an angry moan did make!/ And what can ail the mastiff bitch?/ Never till now she uttered yell/ Beneath the eye of Christabel."
• In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, the mountebank's dog will not cross the drawbridge into the courtyard of the schloss and howls continually while the mountebank converses with Laura and Carmilla. For added irony, the mountebank is eager to sell his vampire-repellent charms but scolds his dog for howling.
• The Case of the Leannabh Sidhe, featuring Margery Lawrence's supernatural sleuth-mystic Miles Pennoyer, centers around a young boy named Patrick whose disposition suddenly shifted some years prior to the start of the narration. Patrick's concerned Aunt reports to Pennoyer that before the change, Patrick had a puppy companion from whom he was inseparable — after the change, his puppy wouldn't go near him. The other dogs of the household also avoid the child, which Pennoyer pays close attention to as "dogs are the creatures closest and most sensitive to mankind." It fuels Pennoyer's theory that the boy is a Changeling that had been swapped for the real Patrick. Interestingly, Patrick acquired a pet cat after his sudden personality change. The boy also demonstrated the ability to call wild animals like birds and bats to his side by imitating their cries, even being able to command them to cause mischief.
• The Cat in the Stacks Mysteries: Both cats and dogs in this series and its spinoff, Southern Ladies Mysteries.
  • Charlie Harris's Maine Coon cat Diesel has a knack for telling nice people from nasty ones. People he dislikes include one crook in Book 2 and two Asshole Victims in Book 3, and in Book 7, he backs away from Oscar Reilly when they first meet, even before the man proves to be a total jerkwad, showing that Diesel's instincts are spot on.
  • In Ladies #4, the Ducote sisters' dog Peanut reacts with hostility to the greedy and thoroughly unpleasant Nathan Gamble.
• The Cat Who... Series:
  • Qwill's hyper-intelligent Siamese cat Koko has shades of this. He especially dislikes the gold-digging Melinda Goodwinter, who was intent on marrying Qwill for his money and later tried to kill another woman whom she felt was in her way, and expressed this dislike quite often.
  • Koko's talent at detecting crimes is particularly showcased in Book #4 (The Cat Who Saw Red); Qwill is given an art piece by the man who married Joy, Qwill's first love, and he knows he hates the man, but he has no real reason apart from jealousy. Koko circles the piece of pottery and then hisses at it, prompting Qwill to decide, "We can't both be wrong." The red glazing on the pottery was created by its artist putting Joy's body into the kiln after he murdered her.
• Wolf from The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness can smell demons and see spirits.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The Scarlet Citadel", Pelias scares away a giant snake by letting it look at him. Conan is very afraid that it was an evil-detecting snake.
  An icy trickle disturbed Conan's spine, and he wondered if, after all, Pelias were a man, or merely another demon of the pits in a mask of humanity.
• In Coraline, the mice belonging to the crazy old man upstairs give the eponymous protagonist a message by proxy: "Don't go through the door." They're absolutely right — said door leads to the fantastical Other World, which contains magic toys, delicious food, and a life-sucking beldam who just loves children... as in, loves to steal their souls.
• In Darker Than You Think, dogs are capable of sensing the presence of shapeshifters, even in their astral form. It's suggested that ancient humans domesticated them specifically for this purpose.
• The Dark is Rising: Susan Cooper used this more than once.
  • Over Sea, Under Stone and Greenwitch: Captain Toms' dog Rufus fears and dislikes the minions of the Dark.
  • The Grey King: Bran's dog Cafall guides Will onto the Old Way, and later attacks one of the foxes that serve the Grey King.
• Discworld:
  • Sourcery: The Patrician's dog, Wuffles, growls at the sourcerer's staff.
  • Wyrd Sisters: Subverted; Granny says that dogs are most concerned with how their masters treat them, not others, so an evil man can end up with a devoted dog so long as he takes good care of it. She's also using the dog as a metaphor for the kingdom of Lancre which has recently awakened to the fact that Felmet, the usurper, doesn't care about it the same way the old king did.
• A Dog's Purpose: Bailey detects something off about the Enfant Terrible Todd not soon after meeting him. Unfortunately, he can't figure out what, even after Todd tries to kill him, until years later.
• Dracula dogs and horses are frightened by the Count's presence but he can control wolves.
  • When he goes out to meet Jonathan Harker, the horses pulling Harker's cart panic, though the jet-black beasts pulling his own carriage obey him without hesitation.
  • At a funeral for one of Dracula's victims, a dog belonging to one of the guests refuses to go near the grave.
  • Played with a wolf at a zoo in England. It snarls and lunges at the bars of its cage when the Count comes near but calms down when he gets closer. Later, it escapes and breaks through Lucy's garlic-protected window.
• Dragon Jousters: In one book, the tamed dragons — who are established as being as smart as bright dogs — hiss and go into threat displays whenever they see a Magi. This might just be because they watch their riders' body language and know that the riders hate the Magi.
• Dragonvarld:
  • Ven gets found out as inhuman by a dog when he's at a bull-baiting fight, which attacks him, ripping the leg of his trousers and exposing his scaly skin. He nearly gets killed by a fearful human mob as a result.
  • Horses can sense Draconas is really a dragon in human form and are pretty hostile to him, but they tolerate him enough he can drive a horse-drawn wagon.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Blood Rites, Harry comes into the possession of a puppy, who he names Mouse; during it, he growls at people that Harry later learns are evil. Mouse grows up to be a very, very large dog, and is explicitly identified as a temple dog: the descendant of a spiritual creature who bred with a normal dog, with a couple of supernatural abilities, mostly of the detection or warning variety. He's also way smarter than a normal dog, occasionally looking like he understands English to a degree. In Changes, we find out that he can. Mouse's breed is in such high regard that Ancient Mai, one of the most powerful and nastiest wizards, will accept its judgment and testimony without a second thought. Also, Nicomedeus, a 2,000-year-old demon-possessed arch-villain and leader of a bunch of other demon-possessed people, is apparently afraid of Mouse.
  • Harry's first pet, a large housecat named Mister, gets along fine with the supernatural... so long as it's not an immediate threat, or else interrupting his dinner.
  • Small Favor: The Pacific white-sided dolphins at Shedd Aquarium start chittering loudly to alert Harry that he's about to be ambushed. When one of the Blackened Denarii falls into their tank, the cetaceans scatter, swimming away from the cursed coin as if they recognize that it's a threat.
• Emergence: Terry (a macaw) takes an immediate and intense dislike to Rollo, an opinion later events show to be entirely justified.
• Everworld: A variant. For whatever reason, horses (including talking ones) will not allow a witch to ride them. Witches don't seem to be Always Chaotic Evil, but this trope certainly applies to Senna.
• In the Fairy Oak series:
  • Nibbler often finds himself as the victim of a transformation spell because of his habit of confronting emisaries of the Enemy. On a less serious note, he heavily dislikes Adelaide Spleenworth, one of the few villagers who is truly egotistic.
  • Barolo starts barking and growling at the four men that unexpectedly arrive to the Poppy's house. Sure enough, they are all part of the army of the Enemy.
• Family Skeleton Mysteries: Sid the ambulatory (and friendly) skeleton has encountered a few, who sense there's something inherently wrong about him.
• Subverted in a Father Brown short story. In the beginning, a young man is telling the story of a murder case where, he claims, his dog told him when the murder took place by howling, and who the murderer was by barking at him. Father Brown thinks about the story for a week, and then tells his own interpretation to the young man. This interpretation is based on having the dog acting entirely as an animal, it points to another person as murderer, and it is of course the correct one.
• In Firebird (Lackey), all the animals around the palace hate Tsar Ivan and Ilya's brothers, calling them the Monsters.
• Forest Kingdom: At one point in book 2 (Blood and Honor), Jordan finds a bloodhound in his quarters, who starts growling when a messenger from Prince Lewis shows up. Jordan remembers the old stories about dogs being able to detect evil, and is willing to trust the animal's instincts.
• Played with in Caitlin Davies's The Ghost Of Lily Painter. Jojo the dog reacts with anger or fear to Lily's presence, but aside from some occasional poltergeist-style activities, Lily turns out to be benign.
• Gavin de Becker's book The Gift of Fear claims that dogs will growl at untrustworthy people because their owners will detect the malicious intent and broadcast their discomfort with subconscious cues.
• In Andre Norton's short story "All Cats Are Gray", Bat the cat alerts her owner Steena to the presence of a hostile, invisible alien lurking on the ship she's trying to salvage, allowing her to shoot it before it can attack. Steena later explains that the alien was using Chameleon Camouflage. Since Bat is a colorblind cat, this results in a Glamour Failure, allowing him to see it normally. The twist comes from the fact that Steena is also colorblind. She couldn't see the creature as clearly, but Bat's reaction was more than enough to compensate. A rare example of someone actually listening to the Evil Detecting Cat.
• Goosebumps:
  • The protagonists' pet dog in the first book, Welcome to Dead House, barks around everyone in town since it can tell that they are actually dead. Eventually, the dead people get fed up with it and actually kill the dog as a result.
  • Likewise in Ghost Beach, where the old man's dog ultimately detects that the kids' aunt and uncle are ghosts, too.
• In the Harry Potter novels, the cat-like creatures called Kneazles explicitly have this ability. Crookshanks, Hermione's cat in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is part-Kneazle. He immediately takes a disliking to Scabbers because he knows that Scabbers is actually Peter Pettigrew in his Animagus form. Conversely, on the other hand, he trusts Sirius Black's dog form enough that Sirius is able to get him to acquire Neville's list of Gryffindor common room passwords. When Ron gets a new owl, he holds Pigwidgeon in front of Crookshanks to test his reaction; Crookshanks's lack of interest is good enough for Ron.
  • Also potentially of note in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is that spiders are afraid of basilisks, because they have eight eyes pointing in every direction, and no eyelids. If there's a basilisk anywhere near them, they can't help but look directly at it and be killed.
  • Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them describes Crups, wizard-bred dogs that resemble Jack Russell Terriers except for their forked tails, which are hypersensitive to Muggles.
• In Book Two of Heralds Of Rhimn, Daughi is so hostile toward Morekai that she had to be put into isolation for biting him. Guess who betrays Navaeli in the next book?
• Subverted in In The Seasons Of Rains by Ellen Steiber. The protagonist hears one of his cats (a female) screaming in terror, but when he goes to investigate finds his way blocked by his two male cats who scratch and bite him. When he returns to his bed, the female cat is sitting apparently unharmed on his bed. The man is being stalked by a demoness (suggested to be the Biblical demoness Lilith) who can shapeshift into cats or owls.
• In Let the Right One In, cats can detect if a person is a vampire and will attack them. When a newly turned vampire visits a friend with over two dozen cats, the result is that she is swarmed with angry cats who bite and scratch her and refuses to let go.
• In Little Girl Lost when young Tina Miller falls into the fourth dimension, the family collie Mack wastes little time barking up a storm and running right to rescue her when they let him inside the apartment.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Animals react strongly to the presence of the Ringwraiths. In the books, the wraiths' horses (and later, the vaguely pterodactyl-like mounts that fans have dubbed "fell beasts") are an exception, due to being trained from birth to tolerate them. The first movie features spiders, wetas, and other creepy-crawlies moving to get away from the wraiths, although the horses look quite evil.
    • A dog-specific example would be Farmer Maggot's dogs, who really didn't like the Ringwraith who came visiting; its very presence sends them off with a yelp.
    • The fell beasts themselves have this effect, with none of the other animals (even the cavalry of their own allies) wanting anything to do with them. After one of them is killed at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, it's mentioned that its carcass doesn't decompose properly and leaves a stain in the earth, as if even the worms don't want anything to do with it.
  • Much like the example in the film, animals are deeply unnerved by the Dead Men of Dunharrow. The horses of the Rohirrim shy away from the path leading for the Dimholt, and Arod (the horse loaned to Legolas) balks when Aragorn's company later attempts to take the Paths of the Dead. It takes Legolas's direct encouragement before he is willing to enter the mountain, and it's also stated that the only reason the horses of the Dúnedain and Sons of Elrond bear the journey is because of the love they have for their masters.
• Pretty much universally true in H. P. Lovecraft's works. (Below are just a few examples.) On the other hand, humans have almost the same ability, as Lovecraft's narrators and characters constantly go on about how eldritch and wrong the things they encounter feel (or seem or look or smell or sound), even if they can't explain why or don't even clearly see anything.
  • In The Dunwich Horror, the weird (and unnatural) Wilbur Whateley carries a gun for self-defense against other villager's dogs. A dog still gets him in the end. In a library, of all places. And just to show just how much dogs hated him, it actually crashed through a plate glass window in order to attack Wilbur.
  • In At the Mountains of Madness, the expedition's dogs go nutzo over the strange beings they found frozen in a cave under the glacier. They're aliens (kinda) capable of extremely long periods of hibernation. However, they turn out to be not that evil, at least compared to what else the expedition finds under the glacier.
  • In "The Whisperer in Darkness", Henry Akeley's guard dogs can detect the presence of the Mi-Go when Akeley himself can't, and have an instinctive aggression towards them. As a result, he surrounds himself with them both at home and when traveling.
  • Lampshaded in "The Rats in the Walls", though it was a cat rather than a dog.
  "I realize how trite this sounds—like the inevitable dog in the horror story which always growls before his master sees the sheeted figure—yet I cannot suppress it."
  • In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, it's established that animals hate the Innsmouth people ("...they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in") and the narrator notices an absolute absence of dogs and cats around the town. When the townsfolk start chasing him out of town, he becomes very grateful that they don't have dogs. On the other hand, the novella's Twist Ending implies that "evil" might not be the best word to describe the Innsmouth people, and he may not have been in much danger in the first place.
• In The Lovely Bones, the Salmons' dog Holiday howls in front of the home of Mr. Harvey, who murdered their daughter. Even more plus points to him that Mr. Harvey killed local animals too, so Holiday was right on the money to be warning little girls and pets alike.
• Animals in general and dogs in particular tend to be afraid of the Dark Others in Night Watch (Series). They will never attack them but may bark. Tigercub does, however, train her dogs to attack all Others on sight but only to restrain them.
• In Pact, the protagonist is generally hated and harassed by cats and dogs, who can tell that he is a diabolist, a summoner of The Legions of Hell. This proves to be problematic when he's trying to make the world a better place.
• In Perdido Street Station, Lublamai's pet badger Sincerity is the first one to detect the threat of the runt slake-moth, growling downstairs as it emerges from its cocoon in Isaac's loft.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Princesses Don't Do Summer School: The princesses' animals are "on edge" right before they're attacked by ants and their stuff is stolen.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, when Theo's dog accepts Mab's entry without complain, Theo visibly relaxes.
• Rivers of London:
  • Toby, the dog that Peter acquires who moves into the Folly, is very sensitive to vestigia, and saves Peter from Molly's Horror Hunger after the hemomancy rite.
  • In the first book, it's mentioned that a blind man canvassing for charity donations who was slated to be the next victim of Mr. Punch was saved from the attack by his guide dog dragging him away.
• E. F. Benson's "The Room in the Tower" features a dog who is very suspicious of Julia Stone's grave. Appropriately so, since she's a vampire. The pet cat, on the hand, can't get enough of the evil vibes.
• The Saga of the Noble Dead features Chap and Shade. As majay-hi, descendants of Fay-possessed wolves, they have the innate ability to sense the presence of undead.
• The Secret of Crickley Hall: When his humans arrive for a work-related stay at semi-stately Crickley Hall, Chester is immediately terrified of the place - in which occasionally appears a sinister, silhouetted figure...
• In Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Creeping Man" Sherlock Holmes asks "Why does Professor Presbury's wolfhound, Roy, endeavour to bite him?" Answer: because Presbury was injecting himself with ape glands to boost his virility, which made him act, and smell like, an ape.
  • "Silver Blaze", by contrast, famously includes "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" — the curious incident being that the dog did not bark at an intruder, thus alerting Holmes to the fact that the dog knew the intruder, therefore the crime in question must have been an inside job.
• In Sex Crimes: Ten Years on the Front Lines Prosecuting Rapists and Confronting Their Collaborators, prosecutor Alice Vachss adopts a retired guide dog that spent most of its time asleep in her office. She noted however when she was interviewing a child and the dog suddenly started taking notice, that child would always require major therapy.
• Shiki has this in two forms.
  • Love is the Tanaka family's dog. While somewhat portrayed as Dogs Are Dumb, he's the first to notice that something's very off with Yoshikazu, Kaori and Akira's father. He ultimately lives alongside the siblings.
  • Taro is Ritsuko's dog. While Taro is portrayed as a little more down-to-earth compared to Love, he alerts Ritsuko going anywhere at night is a bad idea when she tries to save a coworker. It doesn't quite work and Ritsuko dies while Taro's fate is unknown.
• The Starks' Direwolves in A Song of Ice and Fire will growl at anyone their masters don't trust, and in at least two instances, someone they trusted but really shouldn't have.
  • Jon Snow's Direwolf Ghost was also able to figure out that something was wrong with the corpses they had found beyond the Wall after all other animals would not approach them.
  • Bran only trusted Sam Tarly after Summer, his Direwolf, licked him. Sam remarking that he was friendly with Jon Snow's Direwolf Ghost helped, too.
  • Mistakenly believing that Bran and Rickon's wolves failed to protect them, Robb stops putting any stock in Grey Wind as anything but a Right-Hand Attack Dog. As a result, against Catelyn's protests, he has his wolf sent away and chained up when he growls at Rolph Spicer and the Freys, whose grand betrayal leads to the deaths of Robb, Catelyn, and Grey Wind alike.
• In The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey and Lucio go to visit their new neighbor Mavis Clare, only for her two dogs to instantly develop a violent hatred of Lucio. Emperor, a St Bernard, even tries to maul him, to the confusion of Mavis, who knows him to be a good-natured dog. Lucio explains that the dogs are used to Mavis's honest nature and therefore object to a personified lie like himself.
• Sweeney Todd in A String of Pearls: A Romance, a pseudonymously written penny dreadful serial, is hated by a dog belonging to one of his victims. This actually forms a key part of the plot.
• T2 Trilogy:
  • The Connors meet Dieter von Rossbach, the man whose appearance the T-800 Terminators is based on. Sarah assumes he's one of the Terminators, but realizes he is not when a dog acts friendly to him.
  • Skynet comes up with the I-950 Terminator, a brainwashed human enhanced by cybernetics. Since they are more human than machine, while it's noted that dogs still won't like them, they won't immediately blow their cover.
• In Alexander Pushkin's The Tale Of The Dead Princess And The Seven Knights, similarly to the animals in the Disney version of the same story, the knights' dog immediately welcomes the good princess and attempts to fight off the wicked queen. And when the latter fails, it whines and sniffles, trying to persuade the princess not to eat the poisoned apple.
• In Dee J Holmes' "Three Days In Undead Shoes" Schrodinger warns Jane away from the car park holding her car in the early chapters and fits the bill through the remainder of the story as well.
• Tuck Everlasting has cows. Yes, cows that follow a dirt path and quickly go around the forest that the main character flees into. That's one of the reasons why the humans also stay away.
• In Red Death, a spinoff of The Vampire Files, the newly-risen and morally-insecure vampire Jonathan Barrett is reassured by how his family's dogs greet him with happy enthusiasm, averting this trope and suggesting he's not become evil.
• In Andre Norton's Victory On Janus, the garth guard dogs, like the Iftin, can distinguish the Deceptively Human Robots from true humans and true Iftin by smell.
• Not evil per se, but cats, dogs, and wolves in The Wheel of Time instinctively know whether a person can channel the One Power. Given male channelers' tendency to go violently insane from the Dark One's touch, this would come in handy for isolated villages, although the link doesn't seem to be widely known.
• A Wind in the Door gives us a rare case of Louise the Larger, an evil-detecting snake who recognizes - and frightens off — a disguised Ecthros. The brothers have learned from experience to be wary of people the snake doesn't like. Possibly subverted with the revelation that Louise is a Teacher, though it isn't entirely clear if this actually grants her extra-sensory abilities and intelligence or if it is simply a cosmic "role" for an otherwise ordinary snake.
• In The Woman in White, when Sir Percival greets Miss Fairlie's "little Italian greyhound", it whines, shivers and hides under the sofa from him, then barks and snaps at him when he leaves.
• In the book The Zombie Survival Guide, dogs can sense zombies, reacting with maddened rage unless having been born in fully zombie-infested times. Taken further, in World War Z, dogs are specifically trained for zombie-fighting, helping escort special forces teams and scouts, and with smaller, tough breeds, going into areas humans cannot fight safely in.
  • Although all other animals take the second variety; one way of telling if a zombie is near you is if the wildlife is unnaturally quiet. This comes in quite handy in bogs, rain forests, etc., but applies everywhere.
  • This is also listed as a potential drawback of using horses for transportation during a zombie outbreak. Horse are notoriously skittish of zombies, with even the slightest scent causing them to panic and even throw an unprepared rider.
  • Also in World War Z, one safe zone is shown using dogs in kennels arranged along a walkway as a screening process for refugees entering the city. If the dogs go nuts when you walk by... well, thought you could sneak into the safe zone with your infection, did you?

---