In Ray Bradbury's short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," what happened to the dog?

Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” is the quintessential post-apocalyptic short story. Over the course of a day, a computerized house tends to its duties, unaware that its family, along with the rest of civilization, have been destroyed in a nuclear war. To understand what happens to the family dog, Bradbury uses both foreshadowing and descriptive writing to reveal the dog’s fate.

The dog is the last surviving member of the McClellan family. “The dog,” Bradbury writes, “once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores…” When the reader meets the dog, it is both starved and suffering from radiation sickness. Bradbury uses foreshadowing at this moment by describing how electronic mice follow behind the dog, cleaning up every muddy paw print the dog leaves. Their mission, along with the house’s, is to keep anything offending from entering the home.

“The dog frothed at the mouth,” Bradbury writes, describing the dog’s frantic reaction to the smell of cooking pancakes. Yet the house does not provide the dog any food. Then, in a quick succession of sentences, Bradbury uses descriptive writing to indirectly tell the reader what happens to the dog. “It lay in the parlor for an hour,” Bradbury continues, describing the moments just after the dog’s run through the house. The house, “sensing decay at last,” sends its army of mice to ‘clean up’ the dead dog. The dog’s final resting place? “In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.” The house cremates the dog's carcass.