I suspect what I heard was a deliberate modification of this sexist quote from Samuel Johnson, which I only found by this thread piquing my curiosity: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/252983-sir-a-woman-s-preach...
Trying to find where I got my version from, takes me back to my own comments on Hacker News from 8 months ago, and I couldn't remember where I got it from then either:
> "your dog is juggling, filing taxes, and baking a cake, and rather than be impressed it can do any of those things, you're complaining it drops some balls, misses some figures, and the cake recipe leaves a lot to be desired". - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39170057
My comment there predates this Mastodon thread, but the story in Mastodon may predate whoever told me the version I encountered: https://social.coop/@GuerillaOntologist/112598462146879765
"Juggling dog" has only been expressed a single time previously in our corpus of humanity:
These jongleurs might sing amorous songs or pantomime licentious actions. But they might be also jugglers, bear trainers, acrobats, sleight-of-hand artists or outright mountebanks. Historian Joseph Anglade remarks that in the high Middle Ages:"We see the singer and strolling musician, who comes to the cabaret to perform; the mountebank-juggler, with his tricks of sleight-of-hand, who well represents the class of jongleurs for whom his name had become synonymous; and finally the acrobat, often accompanied by female dancers of easy morals, exhibiting to the gaping public the gaggle of animals he has dressed up — birds, monkeys, bears, savant dogs and counting cats — in a word, all the types found in fairs and circuses who come under the general name of jongleur.”(5) -- http://www.arthurchandler.com/symbolism-of-juggling