Kate over at Enchanted Conversations shared an Animal Bride tale, The Dog Bride. It's related to the group of selkie tales where creatures that are thought to be animals shed their skins and are really beautiful women, and men steal (or in this case burn) the skins and basically force them to become a bride. This tale is unusual in that, initially, the other villagers laugh at the man who wishes to marry a dog (he is the only one who knows the dog's secret). It may be disturbing that the other villagers eventually allow him to do so, but in other animal bride and bridegroom tales, marriage to animals seem to happen with little reaction from the outside world. Fathers give their daughters over to bears and other beasts with frighteningly little resistance in many Animal Bridegroom tales. Of course, that could also be due to the style of fairy tales themselves, which generally represent any emotion or inner conflict through action or symbol, as Max Luthi describes.
The story also ends with a friend of the main character's who marries a dog, hoping to get the same kind of surprise as his friend did-but he is only met with humiliation. So, the moral of the story is, don't marry a dog unless you know for sure she's secretly really hot.
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