Basic Trope: Animals that aren't dogs exhibit very doglike 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.
- Fido is explicitly referred to as a dog.
- Alice walks through the forest throwing sticks towards various wild animals, and they all play fetch like dogs.
- Every eukaryotic organism act like dogs.
- Even inanimate objects act like dogs.
- Downplayed:
- Fido eats out of a dog bowl and greets Alice excitedly when she returns home, but otherwise acts much like a lizard.
- Fido is a tame wolf that acts like a puppy.
- Wild wolves bark, wag their tails, and generally act like excitable funloving pet dogs, only their idea of fun is ripping other animals and people to shreds.
- Fido doesn't act like a dog necessarily, but does act much more like a regular domesticated lizard than a Komodo Dragon.
- Justified:
- Mad Scientist Alice wanted a Komodo dragon for the Rule of Cool, but didn't like its behaviour so gave it the brain of a dog ... For Science!!
- Fido was raised by dogs.
- 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.
- The story is ten million years in the future, and the creature is an evolutionary descendant of present-day dogs (even though it looks much more like a bear, a bat, or some other creature).
- 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 doglike, it no longer recognises Alice and runs away. It finds a wolf pack and quickly falls in with them.
- Averted: Alice has a pet, but the writer has Shown Their Work 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's an animated feature. The animation company can't afford to animate Fido from scratch, and has to recycle animation from Bob and His Dog.
- Fido is a rubber-forehead pet played by a Labrador.
- Lampshaded: "Why does everyone think you're so abhorrent? You're just a green scaly puppy-dog, aren't'cha!"
- Invoked: Alice, seeing the lucrative market for cool pets, 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 that 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.
- Deconstructed: Not only did Fido bite off Bob's hands, he poisoned him.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob was wearing protective clothing.
- Bob is given antivenom in time.
- Alice has Fido defanged.
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