Dog

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.

The dog belongs to the san he triad with the Tiger and the Horse and stands opposite the Dragon, and the traditional reading treats it as the guardian of the cycle, the sign that watches over what the others have built. Dog figures appear in Chinese guardian imagery, though the stone lions at temple and official gateways, often called foo dogs in English, are lions rather than dogs and the English name is a misunderstanding. In popular almanac practice the dog year is read as a year for consolidation, fair dealing and the settling of obligations. As with the other eleven, the practical use of the sign is through the branch: its earth phase, its position in the twelve, its harmonies and clashes, and its combination with the heavenly stem to place the year within the sixty-term cycle.

The tiangou, celestial dog, eclipse-devouring myth documented under the sign's paired entry has a close structural parallel, independently arrived at, in the Norse myth of the wolves Skoll and Hati chasing the sun and moon, and in several unrelated cultures' practice of making noise during a solar or lunar eclipse to frighten off the devouring creature, a striking case of similar folk explanations for the same startling astronomical event arising in societies with no contact with one another.