Among all creatures with the capacity to be cartoonified, the canine can express the most while saying the least.

That Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig speak with such verbosity is arguably a sign of the relative inexpressiveness of rabbits, ducks, and pigs. By contrast, the great animated dogs can communicate empathy, amusement, contempt, or boredom with a cocked head or upturned ear. For example, in the animated adventures of Charles M. Schulz’s Charlie Brown, Snoopy observes and often intrudes on the action with regularity without ever being reduced to mere words. Herge’s Snowy, animated in the Tintin cartoon series in the 1990s and the Tintin movie Steven Spielberg made in 2011, is similarly nonverbal. Wes Anderson, who memorably made a star out of live-action hound dog Buckley in The Royal Tenenbaums, arguably erred when giving lines to his cast in his cartoon Isle of Dogs.