This trope is about the fact that women seem to be naturally fond of animals, and tend to show more interest in a man who has one or more.
Compare
Pick Up Babes With Babes,
Cuteness Proximity.
Examples:
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- An ad for... something ... oh yeah, Mike's Hard Lemonade, has some men running a beagle puppy rental booth for this purpose.
Anime
- This kind of thing happens often enough in Pokémon.
Live-Action TV
- How I Met Your Mother: Barney harnesses the power of a ridiculously cute teacup pig to get women into his apartment.
- Road Rules season 7 "Latin America": Abe Ingersoll used Menudo, the group's pet Chihuahua, to meet girls.
- Will And Grace, Jack used Will's dog to pick up guys.
- One episode of Top Gear had Hammond doing an experiment regarding which was a better "girl magnet", a flashy sports car or a retriever puppy (named Killer). The puppy won by a mile. All who approached fell under the spell of the Cuteness Proximity and didn't even notice the car.
Newspaper Comics
- After noticing that the women around him all liked birds, Jon of Garfield slammed an ice cream cone into Garfield's face to look like a beak, and asked a passerby if she wanted to pet his parrot. (She asked if it talked, and the strip ended with Garfield thinking "The stories I could tell, lady.")
- A Far Side comic had a man test this theory, by taking a pet alligator for a walk in the park. It ended up eating another woman's poodle.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Johnny Bravo tries this by buying an emu. Goes about as well as expected.
- In an episode of American Dad, Steve wants to get a dog for this purpose. His dad brings him home an old, weak, dying, 20-year old dog. Steve reluctantly takes it, and gets mocked by some passing girls. However, he sees this as a positive since a girl "noticed him".
- Gender-flipped in the Phineas And Ferb episode "Mispercieved Monotreme", where Candace appropriates her brothers' pet platypus after her crush Jeremy mentions that "you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat animals" and invites her to his charity pet-wash.
- Beast Boy tried a form of this when he sees two girls giving attention to a cute dog and turns into a dog hoping for the same treatment. However, since his dog form is green and smells like old pizza, he didn't get the intended response.
Real Life
