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The story
A thread titled “The Most Tragic Deaths in Dog History: A Ranking” on 5ch’s live-commentary board took off, spawning a lively pile-on of famously doomed dogs — Laika, the Soviet space dog sent up without enough fuel to return; a dog from Pompeii buried by a pyroclastic flow; a dog found mummified inside a felled tree trunk 20 years after it got trapped there. But once the countdown reached #8, someone dropped an ill-timed political joke into the thread, sending it off the rails. The original poster wrapped up with “Not announcing #1 — things got too heated,” and the final ranking was never revealed.
What people said
In February 2026, a Chihuahua waiting in a car for its owner at the Ebina service area was stolen along with the vehicle, then dumped in a river to destroy the evidence.
Its body was later recovered.
──More precious than my own life
The family I want to protect
The Mightiest ♡ Anamaro Family
Left inside a car in blazing heat and effectively baked alive
In just two hours, the Anamaro family was wiped out
There are parents out there who leave the kids they carried and gave birth to in a hot car, so yeah, figured dogs would get the same treatment.
Bonus points for the owner actually posting photos of the corpse.
22 sled dogs abandoned in Antarctica
Left behind with only about two months' worth of food.
Only the two pack leaders, Taro and Jiro, made it out alive. The remaining 20 were later found reduced to bones — believed to have resorted to cannibalism amid the food shortage before meeting a grim end.
So sad.
Can bodies even get reduced to bone in Antarctica, where there aren't any microbes?
A dog unearthed in Pompeii, the city famous for being buried by a pyroclastic flow.
The pose is so dynamic you can practically hear it screaming "AAAH, IT'S HOT!!!" as it burned to death — brutal.
A dog discovered inside a felled tree.
Believed to have gotten trapped in a hollow in the trunk roughly 20 years earlier and died there.
Even mummified, its agonized expression still conveys just how horrific its death must have been.
This is the death I'd least want.
Looks like it could be a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Stand.
The mascot dog of the popular morning show ZIP!.
His vocal cords were removed because his barking was too loud, and after being shipped all over the country for appearances, a staff mistake left him locked in a car with the AC off — he baked to death.
"The nation's beloved pooch" sounds nice, but the reality was pure tragedy.
Brutal. That dog actually went out like that?
The fact that the memorial book had a hot dog illustration in it is unbelievably messed up.
The astro-pooch who rode a Soviet-built rocket into orbit.
She was, in effect, the very first dog to venture into space.
But no fuel was provided for the return trip, so — in more ways than one — she became "the dog who never came home."
Her remains, with no one to mourn beside her, are still drifting through space to this day.
She's basically evolved into a Space Dog by now.
Actually, that's false —
Communication from Sputnik 2, which carried Laika, cut out on November 10th, and the craft ultimately burned up re-entering the atmosphere on April 14, 1958, 162 days after launch.
It's just big in scale — doesn't really feel "tragic" so much. Plus, it was a genuine achievement.
JoJo's Araki!! (referring to Hirohiko Araki, creator of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure)
Honestly this one feels even sadder.
Apparently the insulation failed and it basically got steamed to death right after launch, so that still counts.
This dog had been stuck inside a tree's hollow — the hole in the trunk's core — since around 1960, for roughly 20 years, until loggers finally found it.
It's believed to have been a hunting dog that chased some small animal in through the base of the tree, got trapped in the hollow, and died there.
The tree's tannin content is thought to have acted as a natural preservative afterward, leaving it perfectly mummified. Reported by outlets including allthatsinteresting.com.
what was inside
the bonus prize───
What about the dog that was supposedly all of creation itself, yet still lost to a bullet?
You can't beat the sun.
If anything, I respect it for even trying.
You already know, right? It's the American dog. Quit being mean! *rage*
What you actually think of in your final moment is surely "how you lived."
But Yorushika sang, "because the value of a life is in how it ends," so…
Background and Key Points
Laika was a symbol of the Cold War space race. The Soviet Union initially claimed she “survived until re-entry and was then euthanized,” but it was officially revealed in 2002 that she had actually died within hours of launch due to overheating inside the capsule. The Pompeii dog’s dynamic pose is essentially a byproduct of the casting technique pioneered by 19th-century excavator Giuseppe Fiorelli, who poured plaster into the cavities left behind as bodies decomposed, reconstructing their final forms. In the thread, a scientific question was raised about the dogs abandoned in Antarctica — whether skeletonization can occur in an environment without microbes — but no clear answer was reached. In cold, dry conditions, freeze-drying and UV-driven tissue breakdown can expose bone even without microbial activity. Note that toward the end of the thread, a post mocking an assassination sparked backlash and the discussion turned hostile; that exchange has been omitted from this article.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Shocking] The Ranking of the Most Tragic Deaths in Dog History Is Finally Revealed wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
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