The Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/24/18, with a fresh take on dogs to beware of: not vicious guard or attack dogs, but hyperkinetic emotional-support dogs overwhelming passing pedestrians by lavishing empathetic concern on them:
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(#1) An especially nice touch is the dog saying — this is cartoonland, where animals talk, in English — that it can smell the hurt, the cluster of emotional states that give off markers that many dogs can in fact smell and interpret
(Hat tip to Ellen Kaisse, for alerting me to this Coverly.)
Background: the classic Beware of Dog sign, on a boundary of enclosed premisses:
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(#2) Designed to warn off malicious intruders and to warn innocent visitors that they have to seek assistance to enter
Background: previously in Speed Bump. In my 10/20/15 posting “Going to the dogs”:
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(#3) A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), but one that works only in pronunciation (not in print): avant-garde + guard dog, referring to what is in this case an avant-garde guard dog
Background: emotional-support animals. Previously on this blog:
— in my 10/19/14 posting “Animals on duty”, on a Patricia Marx piece in the New Yorker about emotional-support animals:
Contrary to what many business managers think, having an emotional-support card merely means that one’s pet is registered in a database of animals whose owners have paid anywhere from seventy to two hundred dollars to one of several organizations, none of which are recognized by the government. (You could register a Beanie Baby, as long as you send a check.)
— in my 5/5/15 posting “Service animals”, on a Bizarro cartoon with an emotional-support bear:
Image may be NSFW.
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an emotional-support card for your pet doesn’t allow you to take it into a restaurant, hotel, store, taxi, or train, while service dogs can go all these places.
Meanwhile, if you let them, Coverly’s emotional-support dogs would follow you anywhere, all on their own hook.