Whoa. That cookie is WAY bigger than I thought.

Rick, you make me cry. It's so sad and so beautiful at the same time.

You're one of his trusted lieutenants!

I got a question now, did Rick recently watch this episode of Tom & Jerry called Puppy Tale?

It be things like this that make me consider that it might be worth it to do the King shovel to all the idiots and jerks of the world. It's not the unfairness that gets me but how possibly someone was callous enough to do da deed. Still in the end puppy gets cookie for rest of eternity and like Pete says in the end the mortals get their happy ending

The Puppy then decided to invade the mind of a well known dog and now lives his new life inside his brain as Spot (Super Dog).

So does the puppy get a name or is he just gonna stay The Little Matchpup?


...Er...Pastrypup? ...Eh. Both sound kinda weird.


EDIT: WAIT. Didn't see the adorable puppy tag. Personal crisis of categorization averted.

I knew she's a kind dog <3

I think it's cool that the messenger of death comes bearing chocolate chip cookies!
My question for Rick is, if you were going for heaven grade cookies why not use the S'more cookies that Karishad told you about, hmmm?

So sad, yet we get to see a sweet side to Cerberus. There's something she loves to see in her job, apparently bringing comfort to a pup.

Cerberus makes a really good Psychopomp. Though I will always prefer Death of the Endless as the best one.



Also I like this idea

The poor creature...but you can't be really sad when a puppy gets to eat a GIANT HEAVENLY COOKIE from the hand of a celestial messenger. (and yes, did someone notice the tear in Cerby's eye?)

I think it was a tear to be honest. But what my attention was Cerberus giant bicep!

Also adorable puppy looks a lot smaller in the last panel then I originally thought the puppy would be compared to third panel and the cookie too.

When I first saw the end results of the poll for the one-offs I thought "Yes!!! We get see to more of our favourite three-headed dog AND more about the metaphysical world of housepets!", I actually was expecting that this strip would contain jokes, such Cerberus being overwhelmed by newly arrived Heaven residents demanding a guided tour, or something like that. The following prediction, however, was proven to be correct: I want this to become a story-arc!!! A big one!!!
Now, since gluttony is probably both frowned upon and pointless in Heaven, how long until they take the puppie's infini-chocolate cookie away?
And does Cerberus have one personality/mind or three?

but.....but....the puupy is no longer a mortal

All puppies and children go to heaven

ah great you reminded me about that movie again.....and i haven't even stopped my tears from this one off yet
excuse me while i get my tish-you

Wow Rick, that's pretty dark... XD

...lightned by hope and heavenly love

yah , totally agree on that , I also really like Cerberus for her single tear after you point it out

First off, I'm glad links are provided to/from the comic, so I don't have to hunt down the thread for the strip like with most other webcomics I follow. It's not exactly the labors of Hercules to do so, mind you, but the effort is appreciated nonetheless.

That said, at first I didn't get what happened to the puppy. Then I did, and started thinking back to the punishment proposed by Maureen Johnson in Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset, for those who would abuse animals. I forget the fine details, but basically what she proposed for such folks was simulating the situation some animals find themselves in on a busy highway, with cars seemingly coming right at them and then whizzing by at incredible speeds.

(I think I'll now have to find where my copy is buried... and I'm not even all that fond of the "World as Myth" series. )

Size seems to be variable in the higher planes.



This is one of those fridge-horror things in the Housepets! universe, the way animals are treated like animals here, when there's no way to deny they're intelligent and self-aware. After all, they can pass the Turing test and then some.

Are there religious excuses for why animals are "just animals" and don't have any rights?

Mod Edit: Please do not double post. If you need to add new information to a thread and yours is the most recent post, you may use the edit button in its upper-right corner.

For the first time in history, Silly Zealot to the rescue!!!1one
Warning: Answering Argent's teological question ahead, may contain religious themes. You have been warned.
Well, on judeochristian religion, the very first pages of the Genesis say that God gave man domain over "all the creatures that walked the earth, prowled the seas and lived on the skies" (not actual quote, but the message can be understood), though teologists debate wheter this means we are free to do with animals as we please, or that we are to treat them with the same responsibility that God is to treat humans.
Personally, however, I prefer NOT using religion to justify killing and murdering, and prefer to use one or both of this reasons: "Their existance annoyed me" or "I was in a bad mood and I felt like it".

Because, seriously, is there really any other reason for which anyone would kill or hurt individuals that they don't need to harm?
Warning: Religious themes on this comment end at this point.

Personally, I'm surprised the humans from the housepets! universe didn't wage any open wars against the other intelligent species of their world.
Think about it, if we humans fight, kill, steal from, wage wars against, discriminate, insult, and pull pranks on each other on a daily, or almost daily, basis: What would we do to other sapient creatures?

Oh man. I was brought to tears by this. Poor little thing. I hope whatever happened to him/her wasn't as cruel as it looks. Maybe they just fell off the bridge. I hope no one minds but I like the first panel so much I'm going to make an avatar out of it.

I didn't know there was a poll but I'm glad Cerberus was one of the top choices and I think after losing the comment section this is a very fitting strip to follow on from it

With the comment section disabled, I feel a bit like that puppy, with a stage of my internet life endingand a bigger one begginning. Hehe

I always thought that Cerberus, with the three heads, would have a lot of arguments with herself.

*imagines Cerberus going Pillow Fight with herself.* *gets Tylenol*

She's immortal so she's had a long time to sort out her differences....or maybe one of the heads has gone deaf and the other has no tongue



exactly what I meant

listen to this piece, the MOLDAU
It just popped into my mind with today's comic

Aw. That is tragically beautiful and beautifully tragic.

On the subject of death, I was wondering where Rick would have went if Delusional Steve had won the poll. He was pretty old and had been in the pound for a long time. I though his next appearance would be as a head stone with his image carved in it, with an epitaph that reads "Here lies Delusional Steve. Don't tell him he's dead, he doesn't know it yet."

Wait:
chocolate-chip cookie + cute puppy + what Diss said earlier = OOOOOHHHHH NOOOOOOO!!!! RIIIIIICK, YOU MANIAC!!!!! Poor puppy *cries in pool of tears*. But at least he's in a better place.... that big doggy park in the sky... with mail men and fire hydrants as far as the eye can see.

Great One-off, and I loved seeing Cerberus again. Better her than someone like Pete taking the puppy to the afterlife

I don't think they judge children. Or puppies.

Poor puppy.

Sneaky, but smart move. Hopefully will get this place hopping again. :)

Excellent strip! Takes some careful balance to touch on issues like this, but it is a noble effort and I hope to see more. Definitely like seeing more of Cerb, and part of me would LOVE seeing her and King interact, just to see what would happen.

This also reminds me of some music I was working on not long ago that touches on that same subject. It was one of those deals where I was just putting down this somber piano track, and happened to lay some lyrics on it that turned out to be about pet abandonment... it's weird where creations sometimes take you.

What makes you think they didn't? Evolution has to be WAY different in the HP!verse, but I can see cro magnon being forced out of Africa during the lion-hyena wars, and returning with advanced spear and arrow technology to fight their way back. And then starts the arms race, it's not like humans had a monopoly on the opposable thumb...

[Bah, Firefox was complaining about one word in that last line... what kind of dopey spelling dictionary doesn't have "opposable" in it?]