I've engaged dog portrait painting as a practice, a way to examine our human relationship with non-human animals. To begin, how can we represent our canine companions without consciously or inevitably viewing them as human surrogates? How do we see them as individual, sentient beings without anthropomorphizing them? Also, in a contemporary context, why is the co-optation of the portrait genre for "pet painting" viewed as purely sentimental? Deeper consideration of pet painting as a practice can reveal aspects of human-non-human interactions and expose biases in human driven capitalist and imperialist worldviews.