Caring About Dogs, Filming Dogs, Watching Dogs: How Far Does the Human–Dog Relationship Travel Through Cultural Production? A Case Study of Good Boy (2025)

Western societies increasingly treat dogs as sentient family members, but does this reshape cultural production, and can cultural production, in turn, reshape the relationship? We traced this circuit through Good Boy (2025), a horror film with a real, untrained dog as the sole protagonist, combining filmmaker interviews, behavioral coding of eleven sequences (21-behavior repertoire, permutation tests), and thematic analysis of 242 reviews on the Letterboxd website. The filmmaker restructured the production around his dog’s welfare, yet signs of stress persisted. The film’s canine perspective generated formal innovation but remained confined to human perception. Audiences showed concern for the real dog but read his discomfort as devotion—no review mentioned any behavioral indicator of stress. Good Boy reveals not the failure of a single film but the current state of a cultural transition—a society that has moved beyond treating dogs as props yet lacks the tools to act on its own values. Addressing this gap will require welfare monitoring during production, representation that goes beyond human perception, and public literacy in canine body language.