Working Like a Dog

I received an e-mail from one of my friends recently that discussed how to be lazy. He also attached a comic strip that wasn't on the site but went along with the idea of being lazy:

I googled to try to find the origin of the word, but couldn't find anything authoritative. So I looked at the dog entry in the OED, and while I didn't find the idiom itself, I found an idiom which I think is the closest to the intended meaning:

g. to lead a dog's life: i.e. a life of misery, or of miserable subserviency; so to lead a person a dog's life.

It made me think of how much we pamper our pets (in the United States) compared to previous ages. If we still used animals instead of machines for manual labor, the comic wouldn't make much sense because most people probably wouldn't see animals just lying around doing nothing. Fortunately (for the animals' and humor's sake) that isn't the case.

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