The Dog is paired with xu, the eleventh earthly branch, whose double-hour runs from seven to nine in the evening and whose phase is earth. The traits assigned to the sign are those the dog has stood for in most agrarian societies: loyalty, watchfulness, honesty, a strong sense of justice and a readiness to defend. Chinese attitudes to dogs have been mixed rather than uniformly warm, the animal serving as guard, hunter and in some periods as food, and the vocabulary preserves both sides, with a range of dog compounds used as insults alongside the positive reading of the sign. The celestial dog, tiangou, appears in Chinese myth as a creature that devours the sun or moon during eclipses, a belief that gave rise to the practice of making noise during an eclipse to drive it off.
Beyond guard and hunting roles, dogs held a distinct place in classical Chinese ritual sacrifice, offered at certain state ceremonies recorded in early ritual texts such as the Book of Rites, a formal religious role for the animal that sits alongside, and is largely separate from, the household guardian and companion associations that dominate the sign's popular astrological character; the coexistence of the dog as both sacrificial offering and loyal protector in the same textual tradition illustrates how a single animal's symbolic register in Chinese culture could vary sharply by context.