After Dean Goodman crashed his car into a canyon in early 1978, something ate his body. His mother assumed it was his German shepherd, Prince, who had survived the crash and remained at the scene for three weeks until Goodman's body was found. She wanted the dog put down.
More details from Skeptical Inquirer magazine (Winter 1978):
this gross injustice was narrowly averted when North Hollywood psychic Beatrice Lydecker interviewed the dog and found that Prince had in fact been wrongfully accused. "I have this ESP with animals," Mrs. Lydecker explained. "Prince had been traumatized by the accident. All Prince could talk about was his dead master."
Coyotes and wild dogs, the German shepherd said, had eaten the body, despite Prince's valiant efforts to drive them off. The canine hero's life was spared, owing to this timely information. A local police sergeant observed, "She says she got the information from the dog—and I've no evidence to dispute that."
Santa Rosa Press Democrat - Feb 28, 1978
As far as I can tell, Beatrice Lydecker is still active, and still talking with animals. She's got a website where she sells various "natural products," as well as her book: You Too Can Talk With the Animals.
While browsing old newspapers, I've come across multiple reports of a book titled How to Train Your Dog being returned to libraries, chewed.
These reports span thirty years, and specify different locations where this happened, but the stories are otherwise identical. So I figure that the chewed dog training book must be an urban legend of libraries.
Patent #10,455,817 was granted in Oct 2019 for "animal olfactory detection of disease as control for health metrics collected by medical toilet."
In plainer language, it's a toilet that has a small door built into the side of it (the "scent dispenser"), allowing a dog to smell your poop (or other bodily fluids) in order to detect the presence of disease. From the patent:
The user deposits bodily waste into the toilet through actions which include urinating or defecting into the toilet, vomiting into the toilet, coughing up sputum into the toilet, and depositing mucus into the toilet...
An animal may be trained to sniff the scent dispenser in response to a command or signal. The user may give the animal the command or signal when the user desires the animal to assess the presence of disease in the user.
The photo below captures the moment a wolf started to attack the face of its trainer, Jacques Suzanne, during the filming of a movie. The camera crew, thinking the attack was part of the stunt, kept on filming.
Suzanne evidently wasn't badly hurt, though the wolf was killed. Apparently he was the kind of guy who knew how to defend himself against a wolf. Read more about him in Adirondack Life magazine.
In the year 1945, a dog named Blaze, while being shipped on Army Transport planes, bumped off several traveling soldiers, causing a national controversy.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.