The Near Death Experience (NDE) literature provides a good basis for reasonable, evidence-based belief in the afterlife. NDEs occur across all cultures and share remarkable similarities. They are recorded in literature going back millennia.

Research on NDEs has exploded over the past 50 years. The common alternative explanations put forward by skeptics — oxygen deprivation, delirium, imagination, hallucination, temporal lobe malfunction, brain damage, wishful thinking, etc. — have all been dispensed with by careful research. If you’re not acquainted with the literature on NDEs, good places to start include Kenneth Ring’s Heading Towards Omega, Jeffrey Long’s Evidence of the Afterlife, or Pim von Lommel’s Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience.

Naturally, NDE literature is almost entirely focused on human survival. Human beings want to know, first and foremost, whether we have an afterlife. Animals tend to be an afterthought, if they get mentioned at all. As we’ll see later, NDE researchers have often failed to ask about animals in NDEs, because their focus was so much on human beings.

Despite that lack of attention, though, animals still manage to show up in NDEs fairly often.

Standard Cases

I found 56 specific cases in the literature of animals appearing in NDEs. Note, this does not include:

• General statements by leading NDE researchers that that animals appear in NDEs
• Hundreds of unpublished accounts (see below)
• Various accounts scattered about on the internet
• The content of large databases of NDEs (e.g., NDERF.org), which likely contain hundreds of animal mentions (see below).

Undocumented Cases

A word about undocumented cases. Animal afterlife researcher and journalist Scott Smith asked NDE researchers why pets aren’t more often mentioned in NDE research. “It turned out,” he said, “that the lack of reports about animals in the hereafter was due to the fact that researchers had not bothered to ask anyone about this issue [emphasis mine].”

Scott Smith also reported that a Cambridge psychiatrist, Dr. Milton Hadley, had compiled “hundreds of accounts of pet encounters during NDEs,” but these accounts were unpublished. Why? Because the animal accounts are embedded within many hundreds of long, individual interviews, and publishing them would be impractical.

This is similar to the problem with the large internet databases, such as the one at nderf.org, which currently has over 4800 NDE accounts. In order to find all the animal mentions, one would need to read through 4800 long, individual NDE reports. That’s just not practical.

So, bottom line, I found 56 specific NDE reports of animals in the literature, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many hundreds more out there, unpublished or buried within large internet databases.

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A Typical NDE

Here is a typical NDE encounter with a deceased pet:

“I saw my deceased dog from my childhood bounding towards me. I remember exclaiming her name at the top of my lungs as I saw her bounding towards me. It was overwhelmingly wonderful. I felt completely at peace and totally happy. I was so excited to see her again, and I did not question the experience at the time. It was as if she had never died and she had always been waiting for me to wake up from my nap in the grass.”

Michael S., NDERF website, NDE 6037

If you read enough of these encounters, you’ll start to see the pattern — feelings of love, joy, and peace, with the animal restored to youth and health. Anyone familiar with the human NDE literature will recognize the parallels.

These parallels are significant from the standpoint of validity. We’ll get to that later, though. First, let’s take a look at some cases with additional, corroborating evidence.

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NDEs with Corroborating Evidence

NDEs are usually of the type described above — simple encounters with “deceased” animals. However, in some cases, the encounter has features that add credibility or validity. These are important, because they help to rule out alternative explanations.

There are two main types:

• Cases in which the NDE experiencer did not know the animal was dead
• Cases in which the NDE experiencer had no emotional attachment to the animal being seen

Didn’t Know They Were Dead

There are many cases in NDE literature in which the person sees a person “on the other side” that they did not know was deceased. Often, this person had died recently, but the knowledge had been withheld from the person having the NDE. Skeptics will often dismiss NDEs, saying they are nothing more than pleasant, comforting hallucinations emitted by a dying brain. But these cases cannot be explained that way. Hallucinations aren’t based in reality, but these are; they are based in fact. Moreover, they are based in facts the person had no access to. They only learn later, after the NDE, that the person has died.

These cases also happen with animals. In one case related by Scott Smith, a woman was declared dead after being in a coma for several days. Five hours after being declared dead, she sat bolt upright, shouting. She had experienced an NDE.

In the NDE, the woman saw her deceased mother greet her cat. Although she knew her mother had passed, her cat had been alive and well before she entered her coma. It had died suddenly during that time. So although the woman was in a coma and then “died,” she saw her cat in the NDE, while having no way of knowing that the cat had recently passed. It’s also noteworthy that she saw her mother greeting the cat, as she might if the cat had just arrived.

Here is another, even stronger example, also related by Scott Smith. A man who was adopted at birth “died,” and he had an NDE. In his NDE, he saw another man, who seemed a stranger to him, holding a cat, who was also unknown.

This puzzled him. He recognized neither the man nor the cat. Much later, while plowing through old photographs, he happened across an old photo of a man holding a cat, and he recognized them as being the pair he saw in his NDE.

After doing additional investigation, he discovered that the man in the photo was a biological brother he never knew he had (recall that he was adopted). The cat belonged to the brother. Both were deceased.

Note that he knew neither the man nor the cat at the time of the NDE, and neither did he know they had both died. That is a very difficult one to explain away as wishful thinking or comforting hallucination. He didn’t find it comforting; he found it puzzling. It wasn’t a hallucination. It contained accurate information, which he had no knowledge of. The information was not trivial but highly relevant and personal.

There are many other such cases in the literature.

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No Emotional Attachment to the Animal

In some cases, the person having an NDE has no emotional attachment to the animal being seen. These cases cannot be explained away as wishful thinking or some kind of comforting hallucination invented by a dying brain. The person has no emotional connection to the animal being seen, and so there would be no comforting, blissful reunion.

Two brief examples:

• A woman saw a number of animals milling about, none of whom she knew. She said a spirit informed her that they were waiting for their human companions to arrive.
• A woman saw a deer, squirrel, and a rabbit in her NDE. She didn’t know or have a relationship with any of them.

So, there is no emotional connection to the animals, and no comforting sense of reunion, and yet, the animals still appear in the NDE.  It is difficult to explain this as a fantasy designed to comfort us with scenes of blissful reunion. There is no palpable sense of comfort in these accounts — the animals are reported as neutral observations, and there is no emotional connection to them. Nor is there any blissful reunion, since there is no history of relationship between the person and the animals.

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Why Are These NDE Reports Credible?

Here are several reasons to take these reports seriously:

First, they parallel human NDE reports, which have a substantial body of research behind them. In NDEs, encounters with animals are described in very similar terms to encounters with deceased humans. For example, the “deceased” individual (person or animal) is seen as younger and restored to full health and vitality. There is a sense of happy reunion. The emotional atmosphere is one of a love and peace. The environment is natural and beautiful.

The parallelism means it is reasonable to extrapolate findings about human NDEs to animal NDEs. They aren’t two different processes, requiring two different investigations and explanations. They are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Meaning, the strength of the human NDE literature can be imparted to the animal NDE literature. Because the human NDE reports have been so thoroughly researched, and alternative explanations have been so thoroughly dealt with, we can extend that confidence to the animal NDE reports.

Second, despite human’s focus on humans, animals still seem to show up in fairly large numbers in NDE reports. Researchers often don’t even think to ask about animals, and yet, there they are, over and over.

Third, there are many cases with corroborating evidence that adds credibility and validity, and which rules out alternative explanations (e.g., wishful thinking, imagination, hallucination, etc.). In particular, we reviewed cases cases where the NDE experiencer did not know the animal seen was deceased, and in some cases did not even know the animal existed, and cases in which the NDE experiencer had no emotional bond to the animal seen.

In my view, NDE reports provide good evidence of animal afterlife.

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