Do Pets Go To Heaven? Jimmy Akin and host Cy Kellett tackle this question in light of records of near death experience.
Transcript:
Caller: We just lost our cat. And I told my son that you have an argument that pets go to heaven. So if you could give your argument that good pets go to heaven, we would really appreciate it.
Jimmy: Okay, so I should introduce a clarification, which is I don’t claim. Okay, so first of all, this idea that you hear that animals don’t have an afterlife is not church teaching. That is a theological speculation that is based on Aristotelian physics or metaphysics.
Physics in this case. And I, in episode 203, which is where I discuss this more fully of *Mysterious World*, which you can get to by going to Mysterious FM203, I go through the arguments for animals not having an afterlife and I conclude they don’t work. I think they’re bad arguments.
So I’m not convinced by that. I would say that I don’t propose they go to heaven. I don’t know whether they go to heaven or not. Heaven is full spiritual union with God. But I do think there is evidence that they have an afterlife and that at least some animals do, and that it may be a positive afterlife, even if it isn’t the kind of full union with God, you know, where you have this intellectual vision of God known as the beatific vision that humans can get.
I don’t know what animals get, but I do have evidence that they may well have an afterlife and that it may be a positive afterlife. Whether it would or would not count as heaven is a separate question.
So there are a number of lines of evidence, and I’m going to propose at least three lines of evidence that we have in favor of some animals having an afterlife.
One, and I’ve already mentioned the first one, which is that when humans have near-death experiences, they not only see like their departed relatives in the afterlife while they’re temporarily clinically dead, they also see animals.
And I did it. And I talk about this in episode 203 of *Mysterious World*. I did a search of a major database of near-death experiences. It has like more than 5,000 near-death experiences in it. And I found by searching on terms like, you know, cat, dog, rabbit, horse, pet animal, things like that, that as many as a quarter of the near-death experience reports that the database contained might have references to animals in them.
Now, I can’t say it’s exactly a quarter because what I didn’t do is read all 5,000 of the reports, but I did find that many. I did find like a quarter of that number that mentioned animals in some way. The actual percentage may be lower than a quarter because you might have one that has the word animal in it and pet in it and dog in it. And so that would look like three hits when really it would count as one if you actually read them.
But this is still a very common thing in human near-death experiences. So that’s piece of evidence number one.
Piece of evidence number two is a sub-case of piece of evidence number one. There is a kind of experience, and this occurs both in deathbed visions and it occurs in near-death experiences. It’s what’s called a peak in Darien experience.
And that’s P, E, A K, like a mountain peak. This is based on a literary allusion to a poem about a mountain peak in Darien Province, Panama. And I won’t go through exactly what the allusion involves, but basically the term has become attached to a kind of experience where you see someone in the afterlife, or you see. Basically you see someone in the afterlife that you did not previously know was dead.
For example, an early peak in Darien experience that got recorded about 100 years ago, you had this woman who had just given birth to a child, and she had this heart condition, and the birth was too much of a strain on her system. And so she was in the process of dying.
And they’d been afraid during her pregnancy that she might not even survive to give birth. So they had her in this maternity hospital and they were rigorously screening what information she was exposed to. But then as she’s in the process of dying, she starts having a deathbed vision and she’s like, oh, here’s my father, and he looks very happy and he’s welcoming me into the afterlife and oh, hey, what’s my sister Vita doing here too?
Because as far as the woman knew, her sister Vita was alive. But in fact, her sister Vita had died three weeks earlier. And they had asked the matron of the maternity hospital, is it safe to tell her with her heart condition that her sister Vita has passed on? And the matron said, no, don’t mention that to her.
And they even had the woman’s husband screen the woman’s mail to avoid anyone accidentally mentioning that Vita had died, because they thought that could trigger a cardiac event and she might not survive to give birth to the baby.
So as she’s having the near-death experience, she sees her father, which would be expected because everybody knew he had passed on. But then she sees someone that she didn’t know had passed on, namely her sister Vita. And that’s an example of a peak in Darien experience.
If you see someone in either a deathbed vision or a near-death experience that you did not previously know was dead, and then it turns out it’s true that they’re dead, that’s a peak in Darien experience.
So here’s the thing. Peak in Darien experiences happen with animals. So someone will be having a near-death experience or a deathbed vision and they’ll say, oh, here’s my grandmother and she’s holding my cat. And the person knew previously the grandmother had died, but they didn’t know that their cat had died. And it turns out to be true.
So they just like they saw their grandmother in the afterlife, they saw their cat in the afterlife. And in this case, what makes this different than the first type of evidence I mentioned is that it’s verifiable their cat had died while they were in the hospital and they didn’t know that.
So this would be, you know, preternatural evidence that they’re having a real experience that they’re really learning about their cat being in the afterlife because they had no natural way of knowing that. So it would be a preternatural experience.
Then there’s the third form of evidence that I would point to, which is that we have so. And again, this parallels other things with humans. Humans very frequently, it tends not to be talked about in our culture, but humans very frequently have experiences that are what are known as after-death communications.
And this is after-death communications are where you have like lost somebody who is close to you and then after they’re dead they show up again. And they can show up in a number of different ways. I also have *Mysterious World* episodes about after-death communications. So you can check those out for more info.
But like 40 to 50% of the population globally has at least one after-death communication at some point in their lives. Okay, well, turns out it happens with animals too. There are animal after-death communications.
I haven’t yet done a *Mysterious World* about those, but I have in the last couple of years there have been some research papers done on this, and I will be doing an animal after-death communications episode in the near future. But you can hear about the other stuff that I talked about, for example, by going to Mysterious FM203.
So the three pieces of evidence I pointed to here, and I could name others, but the three pieces of evidence I pointed to here are, number one, people having near-death experiences report seeing animals in the afterlife.
Piece of evidence number two, people have peak in Darien experiences involving animals that they’ve known which are then verifiable. And piece of evidence number three, people have after-death communications, particularly from animals that they’ve known.
So those would be the three pieces of evidence I would mention. Also, and this is something you might be interested in, but I just recently did an episode on animal end-of-life experiences.
So if you go to, and I can get the number for you for that pretty quick I think. Yeah, it’s episode 366. So if you go to Mysterious FM 366, you can learn about the kinds of end-of-life experiences that animals frequently have and see if you think your animal, your cat may have had any of the experiences that have otherwise been reported.
Cy: Annie, thank you. Thanks very much.
Jimmy Very sorry to learn that you lost your cat. That’s always sad.
Cy: Thank you for the call, Annie. Mike’s in Pennsylvania watching on YouTube. Mike, welcome. Go ahead with your question.