All Animals Are Dogs/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Animals which aren't dogs exhibit very dog-like behaviour.

  • Straight: Fido the Komodo dragon follows Alice around everywhere, fetches her newspaper, sleeps at her feet and chases cats.
  • Exaggerated: Fido is basically a Palette Swapped dog - there's nothing about his behaviour to indicate he's supposed to be a Komodo dragon at all.
  • Downplayed: Fido eats out of a dog bowl and greets Alice excitedly when she returns home, but otherwise acts pretty lizardly.
  • Justified:
  • Inverted: Bob's dog thinks it's a parrot.
  • Subverted: Alice brings Bob to visit, and he reaches out to pet Fido... who bites his hand off. Literally.
  • Double Subverted: ...he then runs off and buries Bob's hand in the garden.
  • Parodied: Charlie has a pet African elephant. It follows him around everywhere, fetches his newspaper, sleeps at his feet and chases cats.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice gets a Komodo dragon that was Raised By Dogs, names it Fido, and trains it as if it were a dog. When it bites Bob's hand off she takes it to a zoo, but Fido is terrified of all the big, green, scaly things it's been put in with. The zoo ask her to take him back, and she gets her Mad Scientist friend Charlie to give him the brain of a dog... but while it starts acting more dog-like, it no longer recognises Alice and runs away. It finds a wolf pack, and quickly falls in with them.
  • Averted: Alice has a Cool Pet, but the writer Did the Research and it acts exactly as it should.
  • Enforced:
    • It's written like a dog because dogs are the only animals the writer is familiar with.
    • It isn't a mundane lizard, it's a Bond Creature. In real life, dog behaviour is heavily influenced by having evolved alongside humans, so the writer reasons that an animal with a mind-link to its human would behave in a similar way.
  • Lampshaded: "Why does everyone think you're so abhorrent? You're just a green scaly puppy-dog, aren't'cha!"
  • Invoked: Alice sees the lucrative market for Cool Pets, and starts slipping newly-hatched dragons into litters of puppies so they'll imprint as dogs.
  • Exploited: Alice, exploring a Lost World, finds a species of exotic animals which are fearless around humans and behave much like dogs. She decides to bring them home to sell as pets.
  • Defied: Alice chides Fingerless Bob. "Why did you think you could stroke a Komodo dragon? Did you think just because it's a pet it'd act like a dog!?"
  • Discussed: "Charlie has a pet elephant." "Ohhh, awesome! I bet they're great at playing fetch, they can carry tree trunks!"
  • Conversed: "The writers of this show clearly didn't do the slightest bit of research on how to domesticate a Komodo dragon"
  • Played For Laughs: Alice gets a pet Komodo and enters it in Crufts.
  • Played For Drama: The story has An Aesop about buying exotic pets without knowing how to treat them.

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