Lassie. Lassie is more of an icon than a metaphor. This collie appears in several fictive forms, most memorably the novel, Lassie Come Home, and a long running half-hour family oriented television series. There was also a 1943 MGM movie starring “Pal” as Lassie (with supporting characters played by the youthful Roddy McDowell and Elizabeth Taylor) and a radio show that preceded the television version.

Lassie embodies all of the traits that humans admire and desire in a dog: loyalty, selflessness, courage, and intelligence. Thus, Lassie can be—and often is—caricatured as a bit of a goody-two-shoes or something of a poindexter. Lassie's devotion provides an opportunity for satire in a Danny Shanahan New Yorker cartoon. In the first panel, an apparently drowning man calls, “Lassie! Get help!!” In the second panel, we see the dog supine on a psychotherapist's couch, one paw gesturing in the air, as the therapist takes notes.

The possible distrust of such loyalty and goodness that Lassie embodies is explicit in Kyril Revels' web site, “Lassie Kills,” where he “documents” Lassie's life off the screen, including her struggle with alcohol and anger management. The co-dependence of dogs is apparently both admirable and a bit disturbing.