In entertainment, there’s an old adage that you never involve a dog unless you are okay being upstaged by it. It’s the same reason why the easiest way to establish a villain in a story is to have that character harm a dog. “Man’s Best Friend” isn’t just a marketing tagline; it’s a truism for anybody who’s ever owned a pooch. We project a lot of ourselves onto our dogs, but there really is a deep symbiosis between us and them that we share with very few other animals. So it makes sense that “A Dog’s Purpose,” a book about a dog reincarnated several times and its reflections on its different lives with different people, might be successful enough to make into a movie. And it makes sense that when you make a movie about dogs, you’re going to have a lot of dog actors. And when you have a lot of animal actors, you need to make sure they’re all taken care of properly.
