I have read numer­ous times how Gene Roddenberry—the cre­ator of Star Trek—pre­ferred the eyes and mouth of an actor play­ing some alien not be obscured by make­up. The the­o­ry goes that this allows the actor to actu­al­ly, well, act and the audi­ence bet­ter empathize with the char­ac­ter. This makes good sense on a series like Star Trek, where the inter­ac­tion with aliens is often less shoot ’em up and more diplo­ma­cy and moral dra­ma. How­ev­er, I had nev­er con­sid­ered this point extend­ing to dogs.