Every year the Freud family dogs presented birthday poems to their master. These rhymes written by Anna were a coded communication with her father and an expression of suppressed tenderness. They enact a return to the affections and appetites of her childhood, and also her anxieties about feeding and separation. The three-way relationship between Anna and Sigmund Freud and their pets confuses behavioural categories. Both the pets and Anna's doggerel poems (here in their first rhyming translation) mediate outlawed or otherwise ignored impulses. This essay argues the importance of “trivia” in history and biography.