For several years, a sad story has been circulating on the Internet about a devoted animal that supposedly lives in a hole dug right in the grave of its recently deceased owner. We checked whether such publications are true.
September 4, 2024 on VKontakte in the public “Rhymes and punches” (more than 5,700 likes with 326,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) posted a photo with the caption: “A dog dug a hole in the grave of its owner, who recently died, in order to be close to the person he loves most.” At the same time, there are many readers in the comments doubted in the authenticity of the photo, calling its work of neural networks. A similar entry appeared in the same name Telegram channel (168,000 views).
This story has been circulating on the RuNet for more than nine years. So, on the Pikabu website there is the same photo with the tag #fidelity posted back in May 2015. The post received more than 3,100 likes, and the caption to the photo read: “A dog is the only animal that loves you more than itself.” Similar publications are also popular in English. For example, in July 2015, a similar fast on Facebook* received 254,000 likes and 601,000 shares.
Back in 2019 on this story turned Attention fact checkers from the Australian editorial office of the AFP agency. Using a reverse viral image search, they discovered that the photo that usually accompanies viral posts was published April 21, 2015 on the Facebook page of Tierjammer, a German public animal rescue organization. At the same time, according to website, its activities are mainly related to Serbia.
The photo circulating on social media is a cropped version of one of the seven photos in album, which translated from German is called “Dog Family Under the Grave.” The description talked about raising money to help animals. The request to send a donation was accompanied by the following text:
"Sometimes you just want to cry and cover your head with a blanket... These photos are very symbolic, they reflect the suffering and troubles of street animals in Serbia. Abandoned, abandoned, hungry and pregnant, this dog had no choice but to dig a hole in the ground under the tombstone and give birth to her babies there. This is the only protection from the cold at night and the already very warm sun during the day. The rain floods the hole, and the mother has nothing to eat there either. If she is discovered, it will all be over for her children...»
On the same day in another post the group Tierjammer published video showing puppies and their mother crawling out of a hole.
However, a day earlier, on April 20, 2015, similar photos of the same animals, taken near the same gravestone, posted on her Facebook page, a user from Serbia Vesna Mihailoski. Her album contains 280 photographs and is called “Mom and four puppies from the cemetery”; the last photographs were published there in September 2016. According to the description, one of the puppies, who was named Boomer, was very sick, but later recovered. In addition to numerous photos of the animals themselves, Mikhailovsky’s page also contains documents about visits to the veterinarian, passport pet and certificates about vaccination.
Based on this information, AFP fact checkers concluded that the widespread claim that the dog dug a hole to be closer to its deceased owner was false because the stray animal had climbed into the hole to give birth to puppies.
However, back in the fall of 2016, details of this story spread on the Internet. For example, on the website of the Estonian Russian-language entertainment portal Lemon it was published under the headline: “This dog lived on the owner’s grave... Everyone thought that she was just bored, but the truth moved people to tears!” According to this version, Mihailoski did not discover the animals herself, but saw photos on social networks and decided to find where they live. “The story about this dog has long spread all over the Internet. When her owner died, she went to his grave, dug a hole and stayed there to live. She was very sad and missed her friend. But the relatives of the deceased literally could not do anything with her; she stubbornly ran away and returned to the grave. When enough time has passed, the faithful animal has long been forgotten. But one day a certain woman named Vesna came across this picture on the Internet and decided to go check out the animal. When she arrived at the cemetery, the dog was still lying there - in the hole. But she was desperately trying to hide something! Taking a closer look, the woman saw puppies!” - said on the site Mur.tv. At the same time Limon clarifiesthat the girl fed the dogs in the cemetery for two weeks and only then took them to her place. The story is presented in a similar form on the website of the Russian-language version of the Latvian edition TVNet And "I cried"
As mentioned above, Mikhailoski, judging by her publications, discovered the dogs even before the photo in question spread online. The information that the animals were taken from the cemetery only two weeks later is also doubtful, since the first photographs from the grave where they lived appeared April 20, and two days later there were published photo with dogs in an enclosure.
Initially, the viral image was published in not the highest resolution, and as it spread, the quality only became worse. Apparently, to restore the quality of the picture, the authors of the public page “Rhymes and Punch” used one of the programs for scaling, causing the letters on the tombstone to become distorted. This is probably why some subscribers decided that the viral photo was created using artificial intelligence. In addition, the authors of such posts often heavily crop the original image, which is why some of the information on the tombstone disappears.
“Verified” studied other photographs of that grave and found out: the tombstone says that the monument was erected to a man named Kuzman Baczewski by his “son-in-law and daughter with children.” The years of life of the deceased are also indicated on the slab: 1904–1991. That is, from the moment of his death to the moment when the dog was found on the grave, about a quarter of a century passed, which is approximately twice as long average life expectancy of dogs of this size. It turns out that the dog that dug a hole in the grave could not have been the pet of the buried person.
Thus, the circulated photo of a dog sitting in a hole under a tombstone is genuine and not created by artificial intelligence. However, the homeless animal did not come to the grave and dig a hole in order to be closer to its deceased owner, whom it most likely never had. The dog just found a place to give birth to puppies.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Facebook, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: @Tierschutzverein.Tierjammer (Facebook)
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