YMMV / Hank the Cowdog

• Accidental Aesop: Screaming at a dog and hitting him with a broom whenever he enters the yard (or misbehaves in general) won't teach him to stay out of the yard—it'll only teach him to be afraid of you.
• Adaptation Displacement: Many readers are unaware that the franchise actually began as a series of magazine stories (which are among the stories later collected in the anthology novella The Devil in Texas).
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Given his advanced age as the series progresses and how fast he tends to forget, mishear, and misinterpret a lot of things, is Hank simply a Genius Ditz, or perhaps experiencing early stage dementia and/or partial hearing loss?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • After the books started to include two songs per book, every once in a while a song would become this. Two good examples are "Saddle-up Overture in C-Maybe" and "Where Were We?"
  • Many chapters of Drover’s Secret Life do absolutely nothing to advance the plot. Justified in that it fits Drover’s personality.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Has its own page.
• Nausea Fuel: In A Dog's Life we learn what happens when Buzzards get mad. "They throw up on the party that made 'em unhappy". Which is gross enough, but then you take into account what a Buzzard's diet consists of... Yeah (also Truth in Television). Let's just say that Rip and Snort learned a very important lesson in that book. Hank himself was so grossed out that in later books he refuses to even talk about it. This gets a repeat performance in The Case of the Prowling Bear, when he tries to hit Hank with it after being forced to say, "Thank you."
• Moral Event Horizon: Tuerto in the eighth book crosses this when he tries to trample Amy and Ashley. Unlike the previous incident with Hank and Drover, the girls weren't even bothering him; it seems like he wanted to harm them just because he could.
• Periphery Demographic: Erickson initially wrote the books for adults. He was a little surprised when he discovered that it was mostly kids that were the ones who were reading them. But he ran with it, and is still going strong today.
• Tear Jerker: Slim's "Song of the Road" in Slim's Good-bye, about how he will miss the ranch but it is necessary for him to move along. It also happens to be his only song that is in a minor key.