Dog Mino spent three of his four years clinging to the grave of its owner, a two-year-old boy who drowned in a ditch near his home in southern Vietnam and never parted with during the year in who lived together.
Mino’s black fur shines behind him, where it takes on shades of faded brown, which the family attributes to the long hours spent in the sun and rain on the grave of the deceased boy from Long An province. , in the Mekong River Delta.
Nguyen Thi Ut, the boy’s grandmother, tells Efe that three days after the funeral, which took place behind the house, the dog sat on the grave and there was no way to leave him.
“I tried to make him stop working because it didn’t seem right to me, but he always came back. In the end, I decided to leave him,” says the 57-year-old.
Special relationship
Mino joined the family as a puppy, when little Khet was just a year old and from the beginning, says Ut, they became friends, they spent their day playing together while their parents worked, and their grandparents took care of House.
The special relationship between the boy and the chick was broken by the tragic death of Khet at the age of two: while his mother was cooking, the little one left the house, crossed the dirt road that separates the house from the nearby canal and fell into water without anyone arriving in time to save it.
He was buried behind the house, as is traditional in rural Vietnam, and three days after his burial, Mino sat on the tombstone, where he has spent the most time since the tragedy three years ago.
With a pleasant character, the dog goes to greet the visitors and sits for a few minutes at the table at the entrance of the precarious house, but after a while he resumes his position on the tombstone, which he will not leave until hours later. for the sun to set.
Under the sun and rain
“He always goes home for a few hours at noon and then goes out again, even if it’s sunny or raining. Sometimes he even spends the night,” says Ut, convinced that the animal knows what happened to the child and that his body is down there.
The naturally silent animal does not bark or howl over the grave, it simply stretches and stays there most of the day.
“Sometimes he takes some food or fruit and leaves it by the grave,” says Nguyen Thanh Go, the father of the deceased creature.
While Ut is talking, the 6-year-old’s sister is playing around the house and Go, the father, is taking care of the 11-month-old baby, born two years after the tragedy.
The dog is affectionate with them, but Ut says that he has not reached as close a relationship with any of her grandchildren as he had with Khet.
Knowing about the long hours Mino spent in the sun and rain, a family friend gave them a shed for shelter, but they had to remove him a few days later due to complaints from a relative claiming ownership of the land.
Given their requests, the family will hold a ceremony in March to move the grave and bring it a few meters closer to home.
“I’m sure that even if we change the location of the grave, Mino will continue to spend his day there,” she says.