Greyhounds have always appealed to creative writers as a source of literary metaphor, whether ‘anthropomorphic’ (treating the animal as if it were human) or ‘zoomorphic’ (treating one kind of animal as like another). Where dogs are concerned, however, the theoretical distinction between the two kinds of metaphor tends to break down given an initial reciprocity between dogs and humans. In a wide-ranging and eclectic survey this chapter cites the evidence. Some is textual, ranging from medieval times to modern and contemporary poets such as Robert Lowell, Alice Oswald, Tom Paulin and Christopher Reid. Popular songs have accompanied the trend while the playwright Alan Bennett has drawn attention to a notably scandalous greyhound metaphor dating from the eighteenth century. There are visual metaphors too: Sir Edwin Landseer portrayed a black dog belonging to Prince Albert, Victoria’s Consort, and packed it with interspecific significance; the artist Tom Phillips has responded to Dante’s use of an allegorical greyhound in Inferno with his own modern collage technique. As the critic John Berger proclaimed in his seminal Why Look at Animals? (2009), ‘If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric.’ Greyhounds are shown to have inherited that primary connection.