Never said 'dog.'

We seem to use the word "dog" for a lot of stuff in the U.S...."

Dog Days
Raining Cats and Dogs
Putting on the dog
Hair of the Dog
Dog in the manger
Dogsbody
"till the last dog's hung"

Plus two old standby explanations for failure: the southern (almost always political) expression "that dog won't hunt" and the marketing postmortem sxpression "the dogs won't eat it," based on a probably-lengendary lavish ad campaign where millions of dollars were spent introducing a dog food product that failed because no one had bothered consulting with the dogs first. Now applied metaphorically to lots of hastily-planned flops.