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July 24, 2012 - Skeptoid
16:16
Skeptoid #320: The Suicide Dogs of Overtoun Bridge

There's a bridge in Scotland where dogs are said to deliberately commit suicide. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Dogs Jumping From Overton Bridge 00:14:13
We've got a wonderful investigation for you today of an infamous stone bridge in Scotland where dogs are said to cast themselves over the side in a deliberate act of suicide.
Our journey is going to take us through documentary research, through the annals of animal behavior, and even animal neurology.
Can we know why these dogs are doing this?
It turns out we can, and we do.
The Suicide Dogs of Overton Bridge is coming up next on Skeptoid.
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The Suicide Dogs of Overton Bridge In the rolling green foothills outside of West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, stands the impressive Victorian stone mansion known as Overton House.
It was originally built in the 1860s as a private retreat of industrialist and philanthropist James White, the first Lord Overton, from locally quarried granite.
It has the ornate look and size of a classic Scottish castle, and leading up to it is a bridge that is no less imposing.
The heavy granite structure spans the shallow rocky creek called Overton Burn, 15 meters below the roadway.
Something about the bridge has an unusual effect on dogs.
The story goes that over the past few decades, at least 50 dogs have leaped the walls and fallen to their deaths on the creek bottom far below.
This bridge of doggy doom is known to some as Rover's Leap, the place that compels dogs to suddenly and deliberately commit suicide.
In 1995, a border collie named Ben, owned by Donna Cooper, jumped the wall and fell, injuring himself so badly that he had to be euthanized.
Ben's death got picked up by the newspapers, and Overton Bridge became a phenomenon.
Stories about the dog suicides at Overton became so widespread that even the Daily Mail newspaper, not exactly renowned for its responsible factual reporting, cited the work of Rupert Sheldrake in an article about the bridge.
Sheldrake believes that dogs have psychic powers and maintain a psychic connection with their owners.
The Daily Mail also pointed out a potential connection between human suicides in Dunbarton and the Overton dog suicides, stating that Dunbarton is a site of economic decline and regularly voted one of the most depressing places in Britain to live.
Thus, their citation of Rupert Sheldrake, the dogs became suicidal because of their psychic connection to their suicidal owners.
The Daily Mail concluded, so perhaps the dogs jumped to their deaths because they picked up on some human cues.
There have been no reports of suicidal tendencies by owners of any of the dead dogs, but nevertheless virtually every report on the Overton Bridge now includes the Daily Mail's nonsensical discussion of Rupert Sheldrake and his psychic dogs.
Some point to the idea of the graveyard of the whales, or the secret place in the jungle where the elephants all go to die, as if they are precedents for a specific location favored by dogs to end their lives.
Most popular tellings of the Overton Bridge legend mention ghosts that are said to reside at Overton House, postulating that perhaps they spook the dogs or somehow haunt them into wanting to jump.
It's also commonly noted that a disturbed man once threw his young son off the bridge, and proposed that this indicates some force affects the mind there and compels the dogs to jump.
Such flights of fancy are what we call explaining an unknown with another unknown and are not explanations at all.
We want to know what's actually going on.
And is so often the case on Skeptoid, the first question to answer is whether the story is even true or not.
Before trying to explain a strange report, first determine whether it actually happened at all, or at least whether it happened as reported.
Perhaps Ben the Border Collie was just a fluke accident.
Did Overton Bridge genuinely have a history of dog suicides?
Sources are all over the map.
All have been reported only after Ben's 1995 jump.
The Aiken Standard newspaper said scores of dogs during the past three decades.
The Linux newspaper in Dunbartonshire said five dogs.
The Daily Mail said 50 dogs in 50 years, including six dogs in six months.
And the Dumbarton and Vale of Levin Reporter said around 50 dogs have died in the past 50 years.
None of these newspapers give a source for their counts.
In many of the stories I cover here on Skeptoid, it turns out there's a person somewhere who obsessively collects every piece of data pertaining to their particular mystery.
Every newspaper clipping, every photograph, everything that anyone knows.
When I find such a person, I often learn something new that's never made it into the popular telling of the story.
And so, since every version of the Overton Bridge story I came across simply retold the same old vague facts, I tried to find the Overton Bridge guru.
Professor Google did not seem to know of one.
I spoke with the Dunbartonshire Chamber of Commerce.
They did not know of either a local historian or of any records of dog jumps.
I spoke with the dog warden for West Dunbartonshire Council.
Nothing.
I even spoke with the community sergeant at the Dunbarton Police Office.
She did not know of any such records.
Finally, I went straight to the source.
Overton House is now a bed and breakfast that supports a Christian shelter for local young women down on their luck.
It's run by Bob and Melissa Hill, missionaries from Fort Worth, Texas.
At the time I contacted them, they'd been there for over 10 years, and I found them happy to share what they know of Rover's Leap.
Turns out, it's not much.
In those 10 years, they've heard of three dogs who jumped, two of which walked away, and one of which was later euthanized due to his injuries.
Those three include Ben the Border Collie and one other, Kenneth Mikely's golden retriever, Hendrix, who jumped but survived uninjured.
This number dovetails pretty well with that given by a doctor at the local Glen Bray Veterinary Clinic, who has treated four dogs who were injured in falls from the bridge over the past 13 years.
To me, it smacked of urban legend.
There seemed to be no records at all of any dog deaths, except Ben's, and no reason to suspect Ben had deliberately committed suicide.
However, if your dog does jump off a bridge, there's no reason that you would go to the nearest house and report it, or call the police and report it.
The lack of official records says very little about whether or not it actually happens.
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So the answer to our first and most important question, whether an unusual number of dog deaths actually happens at Overton Bridge, is unanswered.
There are two named and a total of six documented cases, not 50 and not one a month since the 1950s.
A number that does not strike me as surprising.
Dogs love to run around and explore, so in practice, I'd shrug this one off at this point until there's at least a proven phenomenon there to explain.
But when one of the television crews did a TV show about the bridge, which of course began from the unsupported presumption that dogs truly do come here to deliberately commit suicide, they raised two interesting points that made me inquire further.
The first interesting point arose when they asked the question of whether or not it's possible for a dog to commit premeditated suicide.
Dr. David Sands, an animal behavioral specialist in Lancashire, thinks not.
He does point out that it's common for dogs, cats, and other animals to seek out a quiet hole or cubby when they're near death.
But this has to do with their deteriorating physical condition, and it's not necessary to introduce anything like premeditation, and certainly not premonition.
He states quite emphatically that dogs do not premeditate their own deaths, and therefore it's impossible for them to commit what we humans would call suicide.
However, it is the construction of the bridge itself that eliminates the need to introduce the question of deliberate suicide.
Like Overton House, Overton Bridge is built from local granite.
Its walls are solid granite, waist-high on a man, and quite opaque to anyone who is dog-height.
The solid walls run end to end, and a dog has no way of knowing that he's even on a bridge.
Trees and shrubs stand higher than the walls, and for a dog, there's no reason to suspect the wall is anything that couldn't or shouldn't be jumped onto in pursuit of whatever compelling adventure calls.
But as noted by Ben's master, once he sprang atop the wall, he had enough momentum carrying him that there was nothing he could do to prevent a fall.
The solid wall virtually eliminates deliberate suicide as a possible cause.
Since the dog can't see through the wall, the dog doesn't know that death lies on the other side.
It was also David Sands who found a likely candidate for the second interesting point, and that suggested the compelling adventure that called the dogs to check out the other side of the wall.
He took Hendrix, the dog known to have survived a fall, for a walk along the bridge.
Hendrix was non-plussed until they got to one end of the bridge, the end that dogs are said to favor.
Hendricks tensed and studied the wall.
She was 19 years old at the time and didn't have the strength to do much more than that, but it was enough to suggest further investigation.
David Sexton from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Wildlife poked around and found nests of mice, squirrels, and minks.
So Dr. Sands set up an informal demonstration with 10 dogs to see how they were affected by these scents.
On a field prepared with canisters containing mouse, squirrel, and mink scent, one of the dogs went to the squirrel scent, two preferred to play with their masters, and the remaining seven all went straight for the mink scent, many of them quite dramatically.
It's really hard to get into the heads of dogs, as noted by Dr. Richard Wiseman in some of his critiques of Rupert Sheldrake's psychic dog work.
In most cases, we can't know what an animal was thinking when it did something.
We can only guess at its motivation and look for patterns.
We know that the hillside below Overton Bridge is scented with a tremendous attraction for dogs, at least during times when minks are living there, as was the case during the investigation following Ben's leap.
We know that in many of these cases, dogs tempted by this scent will be unable to arrest their fall as their momentum carries them over the wall.
Why We Can't Know Dog Minds 00:02:00
What we don't know is how often this has happened, nor do we know if anything else has enticed them to jump up there.
We have a fairly complete explanation for what happened to Ben and Hendrix, but whether any mystery remains about the suicide dogs of Overton Bridge, only the dogs truly know.
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