Angry Guard Dog

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
You ain't getting that ball back anytime soon.

"CAVE CANEM" ("Beware of the dog.")

—Roman villa inscription found at Pompeii.

Going into your neighbor's yard is a death wish. The milkman, the mailman, even the kid who lost his Frisbee disc doesn't want to go in there, because that neighbor has an Angry Guard Dog.

Most of the bigger breeds of dog have been used for security jobs, especially Dobermans, Rottweilers, German Shepherds, and Bulldogs. You also have different types of dogs that are supposed to guard whatever, such as a watchdog (who is simply required to bark, so a Chihuahua would do), a guard dog (who merely has to look imposing, like a Mastiff) and an attack dog (who has to be athletic and very trainable). Your stereotypical Angry Guard Dog, on the other hand, is all three. It looks intimidating, and if you enter its territory it will bark, but only if it can't maul you first (and on the way to the mauling). This dog's bite is every bit as bad as its bark. They tend to be the worst professional hazard for a mail carrier, at least in fiction.

Ironically, few Angry Guard Dogs are pit bulls. This has less to do with emulating realism and dodging current stereotypes than with indicating the old age of this trope. Bull terriers were highly regarded during the World War II era, and considering current media trends, no one wants to really highlight them in an opinionated way. And strangely enough, while bulldogs tend to be used in media for this trope, they tend to be one of the worst suited breeds for guard dogs in real life, due to their amiable disposition and poor athletic ability.

Nowadays, the trope is mostly found in cartoons. They occasionally subvert it, showing the dog is a big softie and/or coward if confronted, with the Aesop that a bully's bark is always worse than his bite.

Contrast Big Friendly Dog (though they might overlap if its friend is the person its guarding), They Have the Scent. Neutralized by Scare the Dog. Sometimes named Fluffy.

Examples of Angry Guard Dog include:

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Anime and Manga

  • Mahou Sensei Negima: Thanks to childhood naivete, a young(er) Negi believed that getting in trouble will make his superhero-like Disappeared Dad appear. So one of the things he did was cut the leash of a snarling bulldog and have it chase him.
  • In one chapter of Keroro Gunsou, the Hinata family goes to visit Aki's mother, and the Keronians tag along. At one point Keroro goes to retrieve a softball that's landed next to a sleeping dog (who's apparently named "The Reaper"). Before Fuyuki can warn Keroro that dogs in rural communities aren't usually kept on leashes, Keroro finds this out the hard way and gets chased across the countryside.
  • Ginga Densetsu Weed: Weed encounters a guard dog at the very beginning of the series, whether it be anime or manga. And kicks his tail until Smith arrives.
  • In the Pokémon mini movie "Pikachu and Pichu" and in some other specials, one of the Pichu brothers' enemies is a Houndour. Yes, a Houndour. And that Houndour chases the Pichu brothers many times, and sometimes gets flattned by a Snorlax. One time, the Houndour ended up beating up Meowth after Meowth stepped on the Houndour's head.

Comic Books

  • Krypto the Superdog in his most recent[when?] incarnation. The temperament of an Angry Guard Dog and the powers of Superman = pain.
  • Brazilian comic Monica's Gang has Rúfius, "the angriest dog in the world". A story shows part of his motivation are people who spell his name wrong.
  • Beasts of Burden doesn't have habitually angry dogs, but… when chased by a hungry goblin, Orphan ran through the yard where Vegas lives. Orphan has a pass despite being a cat, since he often hangs out with the local pack and occasionally Wise Dogs. Goblin has no such luck, he gets to face a huge dog with the look best described as "grave". Followed by a panel with much screaming from behind a fence with a sign "Beware of dog" and Orphan running away.

Film

  • Over the Hedge subverts this: a big, scary-looking rottweiler is dangerous because he's a hyperactive Gentle Giant who just wants to play but doesn't know his own strength.
  • The Sandlot has a subversion in "The Beast," a Mastiff that is shown to have a collection of balls that kids have knocked into its domain and given up for lost. A good chunk of the movie revolves around the kids various efforts to get back a ball signed by Babe Ruth that went into its yard. It turns out at the end of the movie that The Beast is actually a nice dog. He just doesn't like to give up stuff that it finds in the yard unless his owner tells him to.
  • In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Principal Rooney discovers to his misfortune that the Buellers' family pet is a large Rottweiler.
  • Fletch has the title character encounter one of these while snooping around at a construction site. Quick thinking enables him to distract it by yelling, "Look, defenseless babies!"
  • Lethal Weapon 3 deconstructs the trope as Martin Riggs placates a rottweiler guard dog with dog biscuits, then de facto adopts him.
  • In The Lost Boys, Thorn appears friendly when he's accompanied by his human, but turns into this trope when anyone tries to trespass in his yard. He's been trained to be this way.
  • The Boys from Brazil: The dobermans that are ordered to attack Josef Mengele.
  • Played straight in Babe where Rex did not like Babe, though he would eventually come to respect and help him out. And the dogs that attacked Maa are portrayed as such. But subverted with Fly, who adopted Babe.
  • In The Dark Knight, this is arguably Batman's weakness: first bandits, then The Joker, sic angry dogs at him and Bats has quite some trouble fending them off.
  • Napoleon and LaFayette from The Aristocats. They're a pair of unintelligent dogs who for some reason both hate Edgar.
    • Their dialogue suggests that they attack anyone who comes close to their farm.
  • In the 1980s Henry Winkler movie Night Shift, the rather nebbishy and timid main character is shown to be frequently tormented by a neighbor's dog who relentlessly pursues him through the apartment complex where he lives, barking furiously. It's a sign of Character Development towards the end when he finally gets fed up and bellows "Go home!" as it's bounding towards him... and it slinks away with its tail between its legs.
  • The family dog in the Dutch Flodder movies constantly attacks newspaper boys and many other people.
  • Played with in The Adventures of Tintin where Tintin is attacked by a giant rottweiler outside of Marlinspike hall who becomes docile and friendly as soon as Snowy loyally leaps out in front to defend Tintin. The dog continues to be comical and friendly throughout the rest of the film.
  • Sam faces two of the junkyard breed in Transformers. They can rip their chains out of the concrete!

Folklore

  • Older Than Feudalism: In Greek/Roman mythology:
    • Cerberus is the three-headed guard dog of the Underworld, assigned to prevent the dead from leaving, as well as making sure living people don't try to slip into the Underworld to visit, or worse yet, rescue dead loved ones or dead prophets. It's always a big deal when someone like Orpheus, Hercules or Aeneus finds a way to get around him.
    • Orthus, Cerberus' lesser known two-headed brother. He's best known for being the guard and herd dog of the fabulous red cattle of the triple-bodied monster Geryon, and is, according to the poet Hesiod, the father of his siblings, by his mother Echidna, the Chimera, the Sphinx, the Hydra, and strangely, the Nemean Lion.
  • Garm the Hound of Hel from Norse Mythology, guards the gates of the underworld until Ragnarok.

Literature

  • In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Brothers of the Snake, the High Legislator has a fierce black guard dog. The Space Marine, however, manages to tame them with a whistle. He brings along one to help with the Dark Eldar.
  • Richard Adams' Watership Down plays the trope straight and desperate. The hero rabbits consider dogs much like humans considered using an atomic bomb in a war: it destroys their enemies, but at a heavy price. In this case, they are alerting the dog and the owning farmer that there is a rabbit warren near the farm. Considering the Efrafans are fighting to massacre the Watership Down warren, that was considered the lesser of two evils.
    • In another instance of this trope in the book, the Lapine tale "Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog" presents the titular Rowsby Woof as an obstacle between El-Ahrairah and the cabbages in a human's garden.
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone : Fluffy, who was guarding a trapdoor.
  • Carcharoth from The Silmarillion is an angry guard wolf. In this case, though, it's not so much the getting in as the going out that turns out problematic.
  • The Andromeda Strain mentioned a rather creepy version in passing: vicious guard dogs who had undergone laryngectomies, so they couldn't bark. You'd never hear them coming until they were already tearing your throat out.
  • The Rat Things from Snow Crash are actually dogs upgraded with cyborg parts to dissuade intruders even more effectively.
  • In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Rogues in the House," Nabonidus has a guard dog that has been known to tear apart intruders.
  • Oryx and Crake: Wolvogs are dogs genetically engineered to be the ultimate guard dog. They look and, from a distance, act like dogs, but if you're so stupid as to approach them, they'll rip you to shreds.
  • In his autobiography 'Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' Bill Bryson describes his encounters with Dewey, a vengeful Labrador 'about the size of a black bear' who stalked him on his paper round.
  • A wolfhound intended to be sold as one of these makes a brief appearance in Mistborn. Vin punches his lights out and feeds him to her Kandra.
  • Guard dogs appear at the prologue of Warrior Cats: A Dangerous Path in order to find the pyromaniacs who set the forest on fire in Rising Storm.

Live Action TV

  • Dog the Bounty Hunter had a dog at the home of a bail jumper's family who dragged a truck tire it was chained to when trying to get at the team and had to be maced to make it back down.
  • Pit Boss: Completely subverted by Hercules, Shorty's dog, who doesn't have a mean bone in his body. Same goes for most of the other pits.
  • Magnum, P.I.: Robin Masters' estate, 'Robin's Nest', is occupied by two Doberman guard dogs, Zeus and Apollo. Interestingly, although Magnum is in charge of security for the estate, the dogs both belong to and answer to Higgins, not Magnum. They don't really like Magnum much.

Music

Newspaper Comics

  • The comic strip Garfield features, makes fun of, and even deconstructs this trope to no end.
  • Inverted in Peanuts where Snoopy was terrorized by "World War II", the cat next door. Occasionally Snoopy himself would be put in this role. Performance ranged from lacklustre (falling asleep while guarding Peppermint Patty) to metaphysical ('You try to warn them the world's gone mad ... ') to, and I'm not kidding, More Dakka (how many guard dogs have ever mounted a machinegun to their house?!).[1]
  • David Lynch: "The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis."
  • 'Irish' Murphy's dogs in Footrot Flats: Tiger, Wolf and Creampuff.

Video Games

  • Several Deus Ex missions, starting with the first Hell's Kitchen mission, feature Dobermans - they are always trained attack dogs on patrol.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has Broggy, the dog of the shopkeeper Broque Monsieur. First annoyed enough that it was willing to take Bowser in a Boss Battle, you actually get to walk this dog after collecting all the Blitties... translated as a new Special Attack for the rest of the game involving him and about twenty kittens swarming the enemies/bosses. It looks hilarious.[2]
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Oddly used and subverted. Occasionally bandits will have guard dogs who sit around barking to themselves, even if you are covered in blood from their owner. They only seem to turn hostile when their owner does.
  • An alien variant appears in The Dig, being revived to prevent anyone entering the tomb of the Inventor. The way to get rid of it is somewhat counter-intuitive.
    • Another one shows up right near the end once you open the Eye. In this case, the way to deal with it is rather obvious.
  • The first level of Earthworm Jim, set in a garbage dump, has spinning balls of fury next to doghouses which are these.
  • ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron: The game features an old lady and her poodles as enemies. The poodles start as dangerous, but if you capture the lady before them they turn into whirling balls of destruction.
  • The Castle of the Crown in King's Quest VI (and The Silver Lining) is guarded by a regiment of bipedal, talking dogs. They take any threat to the royal family very seriously. However, Captain of the Guards Saladin is a Reasonable Authority Figure.
  • Runner from Septerra Core. He's a robot dog built by Grubb, and joins your party when Grubb does. Other dogs bare their teeth; Runner bares a beam cannon.
  • World of Warcraft: take a wild guess what Houndmaster Loksey of the Scarlet Crusade does in his spare time. Other Crusaders sometimes have dogs accompanying them; they seem to have picked up the Knight Templar disposition of their owners.
  • The Allies in Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 deploy fairly normal attack dogs; not to be outdone, the Soviets deploy Angry Guard Bears.
  • In Dragon Age II, Aggressive!Hawke can turn his/her Mabari into one of these. During Act III, a burglar will sneak into the Hawke estate and is cornered in a wardrobe by Dog. Aggressive!Hawke can order Dog to devour the burglar. Fade to Black over the burglar's bloodcurdling screams as he's torn apart.
  • In FHBG, while the good guys were away, their sentry robots got bored. They acted on their built-in Big Brother Instinct and became protective of the vermin.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • In Batman Beyond, Bruce Wayne has a Great Dane named Ace (not the Bat-Hound, but undoubtedly a Mythology Gag) who was actually raised for dogfighting and rescued by Bruce.
  • The Doberman at the dog pound in Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, episode "To the Rescue" part 4.
  • Doug had an episode involving the "classic" version, a bulldog who was preventing Doug and Skeeter from getting a (borrowed and presumably expensive) frisbee out of a yard.
  • Taken to absurd lengths in Eek! The Cat, where the neighbors' yard is guarded by Sharky the Sharkdog, who is a literal shark/dog hybrid. Sharky would often go out of his way to terrorize the well-intentioned Eek!, regardless of where they were. Leading to the classic episode involving Annabel's pool in the backyard, a submarine full of ocean-exploring waterfowl parodying Jacques Cousteau, and the "Shark" part of things suddenly being much more literal.
  • In The Fairly Oddparents, Timmy's ploy of getting friends Chester and A.J. to rescue him from "vicious guard dogs" backfires when Cosmo and Wanda are too distracted to play the part, and the junkyard's actual vicious guard dogs go after Timmy instead.
  • Garfield and Friends had Garfield citing the Angry Guard Dog as an especially annoying trope, since he never understood why a dog would automatically defend a mouse or immediately attack a cat for no reason. (Garfield, of course, thinks that dogs are ruled by their stupid instincts. Garfield himself does run afoul of dogs occasionally, but it's usually after baiting them.)
  • The Warner Bros. "Sam the Sheepdog" cartoons subverted this; Sam protects the sheep but has no personal animosity toward the wolf, as a Punch Clock Hero—literally; in one, we see them both punching out mid-fight, having lunch, and getting back into position afterwards.
  • The earliest example might be in Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, episode "Weary Willies" (1929), with hobos Oswald and Pete trying to get a roasted turkey off of a suburban windowsill. Blocking the way is a fierce bulldog who, after several typical blackout gags, is ultimately sent chasing after the cop who'd been pursuing Oswald and Pete for vagrancy earlier.
  • The Ren and Stimpy Show played with this in one episode. After Ren realizes that attempts by him and Stimpy to steal food from a windowsill are too similar to a golden-age cartoon plot for his comfort, he immediately sends Stimpy (a cat) to scout and flush out the obligatory guard dog. Stimpy returns and assures him there is no dog. Ren goes into the yard, and is promptly attacked by a guard baboon.
  • Earl the bulldog from Rocko's Modern Life.
  • Bronx from Gargoyles is both this and a Big Friendly Dog, depending on situation or who is around.
  • The Pickles live next door to one such dog on Rugrats, often mentioned but only seen twice—three times if you count the Whole-Episode Flashback before it became the ferocious "monster dog" the babies had come to know.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants once had to get past a vicious junkyard guard worm, giant worms being the "underwater" equivalent of dogs.
  • Arnold the security dog from Tiny Toon Adventures.
  • Tom and Jerry: The most famous example is probably Spike the Bulldog from these cartoon shorts. When Spike's popularity caused a softening of the character, the writers merely gave him other reasons to attack Tom (a misunderstanding, trying to set an example to his son about how dogs act, a Papa Wolf attitude toward those messing with said son, etc.)
  • A 1963 Daffy Duck cartoon involved Daffy trying to contact a millionaire, and having to make it past the man's pet bulldog first. Daffy faced a similar situation in the 1948 cartoon "Daffy Dilly", but in "Dilly" the obstacle was the millionaire's anthropomorphic dog butler.
  • A 1998 short of Life with Loopy had Seymore, who confiscated anything going into his yard, including humans.
  • ReBoot has Frisket, a super strong dog that only listened to Enzo. He absolutely hated Bob, which is used as a Call Back when Bob returns from the Web. Frisket sees a "stranger" and growls, then sniffs and learns it is Bob, then goes back to growling.
  • Mr. Burns has a pack of these at the ready whenever his guests have overstayed their welcome. Or if he needs a good chuckle.

Burns: "Smithers, release the hounds!"

    • Although they do get old and tired, leading Burns to reminisce about one dog's attack on his first hippie:

"That hippie didn't think that was too grooooovy

  • On one Sylvester Cat and Tweety Bird cartoon, Granny seems to have hundreds of guard dogs in her backyard, all of which Sylvester has to get through to catch Tweety.
    • The guard dog design used in the short was also made into a single recurring character who often antagonised Sylvester (named Hector in later media). Incidentally Hector's design was also reused as Marc Anthony in Marc Anthony and Pussyfoot series, who, despite his best attempts, is anything but.
  • Shows up near the end of The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The DVD", during the scene where Gumball and Darwin are chased through the neighborhood by their mother.

Real Life

  • Although most real-life examples are just watch dogs, intended to alert the owner of any trespassers, this aggressive variant is not that rare with many a well-protected compound (whether civilian or military) or private home, especially gated properties.
  1. ↑ A Genius Bonus here, as Sparky was a soldier and clearly remembered enough about the Lewis Gun to draw it in detail.
  2. ↑ This is the first time this series has used an actual dog, as the role is usually played by the Chain Chomp enemy (complete with barks). Broggy's more of a giant ? Block with a dog's face an personality though.
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