People in all cultures perceive the world through culturally shared models transmitted largely by language. The study presented here represents an attempt at the construction of two different folk models implementing THE HUMAN IS AN ANIMAL metaphor in corpora of similes from two languages Czech and English. The points discussed include (1) general outline of Czech and English metaphoric faunae, (2) observation of animal referents as to their symbolic values and their potential for functioning as human models, and (3) discussion of one particular animal, the dog. The evaluation of the data is largely based on the proportional relations arguing that the quantitative aspects reveal the degree of productivity, and therefore salience, of the involved elements. (LLBA 2001, vol. 35, n. 3)