Update on Animal NDE Estimates
In my book, Evidence of Animal Afterlife, I reported finding 62 specific cases of animals in Near-Death Experiences. I noted that this number was “a vast underestimate of the actual number of NDE animal reports,” for several reasons, one of which was that the largest compendium of NDEs on record, nearly 5000 of them, exists on the nderf.org website, but the website is not searchable for stories specifically involving animals. Reading through 5000 detailed narratives in order to isolate animal accounts would be impractical.
However, an enterprising reader, podcaster, and Youtuber named Jimmy Akin (see links for his podcast below), saying that he could search the site for animal-specific terms, using google’s site tag. I thought it was worth bringing his results to your attention. He reported:
It turns out that nderf.org is archived in such a way that Google searches its individual NDE accounts, and so it’s possible to put in words like dog and site:nderf.org and get results. I therefore tried this with words like “dog,” “cat,” “horse,” and “pet” and got lots of results.
There were 594 NDE pages referring to dogs, 194 referring to cats, 128 referring to horses, and 144 mentioning pets.
Jimmy Akin
That’s a very large number — 916 if you add the dogs, cats, and horses together. That would suggest that nearly 20%, or 1 in 5, of the NDE cases on the nderf website contain an animal sighting.
However, a few caveats. First, I’m not familiar enough with the search Jimmy conducted to know whether different “pages” might represent different sections of the same case report. Is it possible that the same term (e.g., “dog”), used in different sections of the same narrative report (which can be quite extensive) is resulting in multiple redundant hits? I don’t know.
I do know that 20% is higher than I’d expect, based on other literature, so I suspect it’s an over-estimate. However, it’s not far off from Dr. Julia Assante’s statement that 16% of the reports on the adcrf website (related to after-death communications) contain reports of “deceased” pets. Dr. Assante based that estimate on conversations with the site owners, who are the same as those who run the nderf site. If pets appear with roughly the same frequency in NDEs as ADCs, then perhaps 20% is not too exaggerated.
In addition, Jimmy also adds:
Of course, not all of these pages may refer to an animal seen *during* an NDE, as some may refer to animals seen only in life, but they seem a promising starting point that could greatly expand the case count.
Right. It’s possible that some of mentions of an animal don’t refer to “deceased” animals but to live ones who somehow figure in the story. However, I don’t think that would be a large number, because the nderf website and its questionnaire are carefully focused on the NDE experience.
One more caveat. It’s possible that one person is reporting seeing multiple animals within the same NDE — a dog, a cat, and a parrot, for example — and that is producing multiple “hits” in the search, although it represents a single case.
So, it’s unlikely that 20% or 1 in 5 NDE cases on the site include animals. That is very likely an overestimate. However, even if you chop that estimate in half and say only 10% of the cases contain an animal sighting during an NDE, that is highly significant. It means we can add nearly 490 additional NDE cases to the small tally of 62 I presented in the book.
That is good news for pet owners, so I felt obliged to pass it on.
I’m grateful to Jimmy Akin for running those searches and conveying the results. I’m always happy to hear from readers, and I’m especially thankful for material like this, which sheds some light on reports that I was not able to include in my book. I thought this was well worth conveying.
Please check out Jimmy’s sites:
https://sqpn.com/category/podcasts/akin/