"...I Smell... A Trope."

Barley, a dog, sniffs a fire hydrant, obviously pandering to the most reductive stereotypes.

There’s something charming about how sincerely many dogs fulfill our most stereotyped expectations of them. This is not to say dogs have no identities of their own, of course. Ask any dog owner and they’ll list five ways in which their dog is weird. But rare is the dog whose every facet is uncanine, and unlike most of the animals we learn about as schoolchildren, dogs are very thoroughly in our lives in a way that would dispel any urban legends about their behavior. Of course most Americans believe baseless things about elephants and sharks and lions: How many Americans have lived with any of those species for any length of time? So it is that our pop-cultural understanding of Dog is fairly predictive! As expected, Barley finds fire hydrants very compelling.