The tragedy took place three years ago, since then Mino has spent long hours in the sun and rain on his little owner’s gravestone.
The dog Mino has spent three of her four years glued to the grave of her owner, a two-year-old boy who drowned in a ditch near his home in South Vietnam, and from whom he was never divorced during the year they lived together.
Mino’s jet-black fur lightens on the back of his back, where it takes on faded brown tones, something the family attributes to the long hours spent in the sun and rain on the deceased boy’s grave in Long An province. , in the Mekong River Delta.
Nguyen Thi Ut, the boy’s grandmother, tells Efe how three days after the funeral, at the back of the house, the dog settled on the grave and couldn’t leave it.
‘I tried to make him stop because it didn’t seem right, but it always came back. In the end I decided to leave him ”, says the 57-year-old woman.
Special relationship
Mino came into the family as a puppy when little Khet was barely a year old and from the beginning, Ut says, they became friends, played together all day while the parents worked and the grandparents took care of the house.
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The special relationship between the boy and the cub was severed 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. in the water without anyone arriving in time to save it.
Despite initial attempts by the human family to push it away, the animal does not leave its little owner’s tombstone. Photo / EFE
He was buried behind the house, as is traditional in rural Vietnam, and three days after the funeral, Mino settled on the tombstone, the place where he has spent the longest time since the tragedy three years ago.
With an affable disposition, the dog goes to greet the visitors and lies for a few minutes next to the table at the entrance to the precarious house, but after a while she takes up her position again on the tombstone, which she will not leave until hours later. before the setting sun.
Under the sun and the rain
“He always comes home for a few hours in the afternoon and then comes out again, even when it’s sunny or raining. Sometimes it even spends all night, ”says Ut, confident that the animal knows what happened to the boy and that its body is down there.
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The naturally quiet animal does not bark or howl over the grave, it just lies down and stays there for most of the day.
“Sometimes he takes some food or some fruit and leaves it next to the grave,” said Nguyen Thanh Go, the father of the deceased being.
While Ut talks, the 6-year-old’s sister plays around the house and Go, the father, takes care of the 11-month-old baby, born two years after the tragedy.
The dog is affectionate with them, but Ut notes that she has not attained such a close relationship with any of her grandchildren as with Khet.
Knowing about the long hours Mino spent in the sun and rain, a family friend gave them a shed as a shelter, but they had to remove it after a few days due to complaints from a family member claiming to own the land.
Given their demands, the family will organize a ceremony in March to move the grave and bring it several meters closer to the house.
“I’m sure even if we change the grave, Mino will continue to spend the day there,” Ut says.
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