Matt Loeser has here drawn extremely realistic, chewed-up dog toys, but in his artist statement he doesn't talk about his dog or even much about the expired dog toys themselves.  He talks about the reasons behind making these drawings, and it has something to do with dealing with his own human nature.  Matt recognizes that he himself has gone through the process of being domesticized.  No longer a free-roaming college student, he now has responsibilities.  We live inside a social climate that idolizes pro-longed youth and displaces responsible living as something for "old people."  As one approaches the responsibilities of a serious job, a mortgage, a spouse, and taking care of a dog, the resulting feeling can be a sense of lost youth.  These artworks try to come to terms with this fact in the artist's life.  Matt says that drawing helps him "to identify with the experiences of conventional day-to-day living."

So, the chewed up dog toys are a metaphor for this new inclusion to social maturity.  At the same time though, they retain an acknowledgment of that part of himself which is not completely domesticated.  These dog toys are not presented in an idealized fashion – clean and whole.  Instead, the domesticated dog has chewed them to pieces, showing that the dog still has a wild streak, ready to hunt.  I believe Matt has chosen these used dog toys
to represent his own domesticity, because he appreciates the way they reveal both realities, the domestic and the wild.

We could read Douglas Miller's drawings through a similar lens of animal and
human domesticity, but I think his drawings are functioning towards a
different purpose.  His artist statement tells us that these dogs are
specifically drawn from photos of dogs in animal shelters.  These drawings
are slightly more literally about the lives of dogs, but they imply
humanity.  They implicate humans as the responsible or irresponsible
caretakers of dogs.  Domestic dogs require human care in breeding, feeding,
grooming, providing shelter.  These drawings are all representations of dogs
that have ended up in shelters, mostly due to neglect and a lack of care
from humans.  Douglas points out that "our culture has both a profound
emotional attachment and a disposable attitude of detachment to dogs."  What
is it about human nature that allows us to love something so much and also
to neglect it?