Alice Grove Wiki

Ardent who was born in space, seems to have a very rudimentary understanding of taxonomy, and repeatedly refers to various birds or bird-like animals as "dogs".

A chicken
Ardent when he is in the town for the first time, sees a chicken and describes it as a "Weird dog"
Struthio Ridiculensis
When planning the trip to find Sedna, Ardent suggests they "tame some of the big forest dogs and ride them
When trying to recover an egg from one of the birds, Ardent tries to calm it by saying "nice doggy".

On the other hand, he recognises the transformed clockwork bird as a "bird" and not a dog.

The other characters either don't comment or don't notice Ardents calling the birds "dogs"

In his caption, Jeff repeatedly refers to the flightless birds as "burds"