If you are looking for a dog prayer tonight, you probably need words rather than an essay, so the words come first and the background comes later. Everything in the next three sections is original and free to use — read it aloud, change the name, cut what does not fit, write it on a card and put it in the ground with him.
These are written to be short. Anything long is difficult to get through when you are crying, and getting through it matters more than the phrasing. If you would rather have something to read at a fuller service, dog eulogy examples has longer pieces, and the pet sympathy guide covers the rest of what a goodbye involves.
For the life of Bear, who was ours and who was good:
thank you.
Thank you for the years of him, for the noise and the mess and the fur on everything, for the way he met us at the door as though we had been gone a month.
He asked for very little and he gave us all of it.
Let him rest now, wherever the good ones rest.
We will miss him for a long time, and that is right.
Amen.
Change "Amen" to "Goodbye, Bear" if that suits you better. It works either way, and swapping the closing word is the single easiest way to make a religious form fit a household that is not.
Two small practical things, because they come up. Use his actual name every time it appears rather than reading "your dog" aloud — saying the name is most of what makes this work, and it is also the part people find hardest to get out. And if more than one person is going to speak, decide beforehand who reads what. Sorting that out at the graveside is worse than deciding it in the kitchen five minutes earlier.
If you want something shorter still, this is enough, and people have said less at human funerals:
Thank you for Bear. He was a good dog and he was loved every day of his life. Rest now.
This is the moment almost nothing is written for. If you have an appointment tomorrow, or in an hour, this is meant to be read in a parking lot or a waiting room or with your hand on him on the table.
We are here because we love him and not because we are tired.
Let it be gentle. Let him be unafraid.
Let him feel our hands and hear us and know it is us.
Give us steadiness enough to stay in the room.
And when it is done, let us carry the fourteen good years and not only this hour.
That last line is the one to keep if you keep only one. The hour is going to take up more space in your memory than it deserves for a while, and saying so out loud beforehand helps.
If you have not made the decision yet and are trying to work out whether it is time, when to put a dog down is a more useful page than this one tonight.
Short enough to say in a garden with a spade still in your hand.
We are giving him back to the ground he ran on.
Good dog. Good boy. Thank you.
Rest here where we can find you.
For a scattering, "rest here where we can find you" becomes "go on, then — we will keep the rest of you."
If there are children present, let them say something too, in their own words, however short. A child saying "bye Bear" at a graveside is doing exactly what the adults are doing.
Nobody writes anything for this one, and it is the hardest hour of the week. The house is quiet, the bowls are still down, and the thing you keep doing is listening for him.
The house is the wrong shape tonight.
I keep hearing him. I keep stepping around a bed that is not there.
Let me not be ashamed of how much this hurts.
He was not a small thing in my life and I will not pretend he was.
Give me one ordinary day soon. Not yet. But soon.
Say it and then go to bed. Grief for an animal is heaviest in the first week precisely because there is no structure around it — no wake, nobody calling, no reason to get dressed. Marking the evening with thirty seconds of something formal is a small substitute for a ritual nobody is going to hold for you.
A particular kind of guilt belongs to people whose dog died while they were at work, or in surgery, or overnight at the clinic, or in the car on the way. It is extremely common and almost never spoken about, and the usual reassurance — that he did not know — is not something anyone can promise.
I was not there and I wanted to be.
Let that not be the thing he took with him.
He had years of me. He had every day I could give him.
Let the last hour be small against all of it.
If that is your situation, the sentence to hold is the last one. One hour, however it went, is not the summary of a life you spent together, and a grief that fixes on it is doing arithmetic nobody would accept about a human death.
Most people searching for a dog prayer are not looking for something new. They are looking for a specific piece they half-remember, usually spoken in the dog's own voice, and there is a great deal of confusion about what it is called and who wrote it.
The piece is "A Dog's Prayer", written by Beth Norman Harris in 1948. It is written from the animal's point of view, addressed to the person who owns him.
The confusion is not your fault. It circulates under a dozen search-worn names — a dogs prayer poem, dogs prayer to owner, dog prayer to owner, a dog's prayer to his owner — and it is constantly posted with no attribution at all, or credited to "Anonymous", or to whichever unrelated Harris a website guessed at.
It is also routinely confused with "A Dog's Plea", by the same author. The two are different pieces doing different jobs: the Plea is about how a living dog asks to be treated, and turns up in animal-welfare campaigns; the Prayer is about death and being remembered. If a version you have found seems to switch subject halfway through, you are probably reading the two spliced together, which happens often.
We do not reproduce the text on this page. A 1948 work's US copyright depends on whether it was published with notice and renewed — if it was, it runs into the 2040s. Nobody has established which, and an unresolved copyright is not a permission. Other sites reprint it freely; that does not make it settled.
The reason that 1948 piece endures is the point of view. A dogs prayer for grieving humans works differently from one spoken by the owner: it gives the animal a voice at the moment you would most like to hear it, and it lets him do the consoling.
That device is free even when a particular text is not. Here is an original in that voice.
I was never once unhappy with you.
Not on the days you were late. Not at the end.
You were the whole of it — the door, the walk, the chair, your hands.
Do not sit in the quiet and count the things you should have done sooner.
I did not keep that list. I did not know how.
Get up. Go out. Take somebody with you.
I will be exactly where you left me, which is everywhere you go.
A dog's prayer for grieving humans of this kind is worth reading aloud even alone, and particularly worth handing to a child or to whoever in the house is coping worst.
If you want something older than 1948, there is genuinely unencumbered material, and the usual choice is the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi — long in the public domain and widely used at animal blessings. St Francis is the patron saint of animals, and many parishes hold a blessing of the animals near his feast day at the beginning of October.
Collections of pet prayers and poems circulate widely online, and most reprint copyrighted material without saying so. If you are choosing something to print in a program or engrave, that matters; if you are reading privately at your own dog's grave, it does not, and nobody is coming.
For scripture rather than prayer, bible verses for dog lovers covers what the text does and does not say about animals — including the question of whether they are promised an afterlife, which it answers honestly rather than comfortingly.
And if what you actually want is the meadow rather than a prayer, the pet rainbow bridge has its own history, and it is a better story than most people know.
A prayer is a form, and the form works whether or not you believe anybody is receiving it. Plenty of people who have not been inside a church in thirty years find that they want to say something formal out loud when they bury a dog, and there is nothing inconsistent about that.
If the religious register is wrong for you, use the same shape without it:
Bear. Thirteen years.
You were the best thing about this house.
Thank you. Go on.
Three lines, no theology, and it does the same work. Say his name, say what he was, say goodbye. That is the whole structure of every prayer on this page.
Is there a prayer for a dog that died?
There is no official one in any major tradition, which is why most people either use the 1948 "A Dog's Prayer", adapt the Prayer of St Francis, or say something of their own. Original prayers you can use freely are at the top of this page.
Who wrote "A Dog's Prayer"?
Beth Norman Harris, in 1948. She also wrote "A Dog's Plea", and the two are frequently confused or spliced together online. Both circulate anonymously far more often than they are credited.
Do dogs go to heaven?
People answer that differently and sincerely, and no page can settle it for you. What can be said is that no major tradition teaches that they do not, and that a great many believers have concluded they do.
What can I say at my dog's burial?
Name him, say what he was to you, and say goodbye. Three sentences is a complete graveside blessing, and shorter is easier to finish. There is a dog death prayer poem style that runs to several verses, and you are under no obligation to attempt one.
Is it okay to hold a service for a dog?
Yes, and more people do it than say so. It can be four people in a garden for five minutes. The point of a ritual is to mark the change, not to impress anybody.
Can I read a copyrighted poem at my dog's funeral?
Reading something aloud at a private family burial is not what copyright law is aimed at. Printing it in a program you hand out, publishing it, or putting it on a product you sell is a different matter.
The words on this page are deliberately plain, because the ones that work are. You are not going to say anything that is adequate to thirteen years of a dog, and you are not supposed to.
Say his name. Say one true thing about him. Say thank you, and say goodbye. If you get through it without stopping, good; if you do not, that is also what everyone does.
Afterward, when there is a decision to be made about ashes or a marker, take it slowly — a dog urn or a stone can wait a few weeks, and choosing one is easier once the first days are behind you. If the words on this page did not help and the days are not getting easier, pet grief counseling is a real thing that exists specifically for this.
