Perhaps it's a cultural thing.
Japan is indeed passionate about it. More recently, they mapped personality types - especially that of your partner - to animals (a cat person, a dog-like boyfriend, etc.), and before that there was categorizing facial features specifically (e.g. dog-faced). Telling somebody they're like a certain animal can also just mean they're cute.
Worldwide, you can compare somebody's behaviour to that of some animal (mad as a hornet, a dog in the manger. lazy as a bear, eat or look like a pig), be given a pet name after a shared trait or vague resemblance (puppy, tiger, chipmunk, conejito, chaton, Mausebär), offend by calling somebody an animal that has negative traits associated with it (in English you can even verb animals: chicken, rat, leech, ape, bug...), and notice similarities between pets and their owners.
I think it's a bit much to claim that it happens "worldwide", unless you've actually studied on this?
The reason I specifically used "pet" rather than "animal" in my comment was because in my country I've only heard of people being compared to animals in a derogatory way (pig, chicken etc.), as you and others mentioned. If I heard someone talking about dog or cat energy I'd think they've probably been influenced by US (or Japanese) media.
Also, it does seem like animal comparisons in English are usually more particular. It’s not “you’re just like a dog,” but something like, “you’re as loyal as a dog.” We note the feature we want to highlight first to avoid accidentally making any unflattering remarks.
To me "you're as loyal as a dog" also seems insulting lol. It would sound to me like they're calling me a blindly obedient. I'm not sure if it's personal or cultural in this case, but, for the record, most of my family agreed.
last edited at Mar 25, 2024 9:39AM