The claim of a dog eating one's homework is inherently suspect since it is both nearly impossible for a teacher to disprove and conveniently absolves the student who gives that excuse of any blame.

However, although suspicious, the claim is not absolutely beyond possibility since dogs are known to eat—or chew on—bunches of paper; John Steinbeck was once forced to ask his editor for additional time due to half the manuscript of Of Mice and Men having been eaten by his Irish Setter.

It was so recorded, more than once, in the 1965 bestselling novel Up the Down Staircase, and began to assume its present sense as the sine qua non of dubious excuses, particularly in American culture, both in school and out, in the 1970s.

American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have used it to criticize political opponents, and it has been a source of humor for various comic strips and television shows, such as The Simpsons.

The earliest known variation[2] on the idea that written work might be adversely affected by the tendency of some dogs to chew on paper came in a 1905 issue of The Cambrian, a magazine for Welsh Americans.

The first use of the phrase recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1929, in an essay in the British newspaper The Guardian: "It is a long time since I have had the excuse about the dog tearing up the arithmetic homework."

Bel Kaufman's bestselling comic novel, Up the Down Staircase, published that year, includes two instances where the protagonist's students blame their failure to complete their assignment on their dogs.

[10] Lexicographer Barry Popik, who called it "the classic lame excuse that a student makes to a teacher to cover for missing homework", found citations in print increasing from 1976.

DJ, knowing that the excuse is a cliché, decides against telling her teacher what happened and claiming her toddler sister Michelle ate the report instead.

It became an occasional running gag on The Simpsons, which also began airing that year, mostly playing off Bart's tendency to offer ridiculous excuses for all sorts of misconduct to his teacher Mrs. Krabappel.

[18] In a 2000 episode of the animated television series CatDog featuring an anthropomorphic cat/dog conjoined twin, Cat hatched a plan to get rich by having Dog eat other people's homework.

A Sam Gross New Yorker cartoon from 1996 shows a Venetian classroom of several centuries ago where a standing student announces "The Doge ate my homework.