My dog ate my homework
 Video of a dog eating alleged homework
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"The dog ate my homework" is an English expression purported to be a favorite excuse made by schoolchildren explaining their failure to turn in an assignment on time. The claim of a dog eating one's homework is inherently suspect since it is both impossible for a teacher to disprove and conveniently absolves the student who gives that excuse of any blame. Although suspicious, the claim is not absolutely beyond possibility since dogs are known to eat—or chew on—bunches of paper. It has grown beyond the educational context, becoming a sarcastic rejoinder to a similarly glib or otherwise insufficient or implausible explanation for a failure in any context.
As an explanation for missing documents, it dates to a story about a Welsh minister first recorded in print in 1905. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that a 1929 reference establishes that schoolchildren had at some time earlier than that offered it as an excuse to teachers. It was so recorded, more than once, in the 1965 bestselling novel Up the Down Staircase, and began to assume its present sense as the sine qua non of dubious excuses, particularly in American culture, both in school and out, in the 1970s. American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have used it to criticize political opponents, and it has been a source of humor for various comic strips and television shows, such as The Simpsons.
The earliest known variation on the idea that written work might be adversely affected by the tendency of some dogs to chew on paper came in a 1905 issue of The Cambrian, a magazine for Welsh Americans. William ApMadoc, the journal's music critic, related an anecdote about a minister temporarily filling in at a country church in Wales. After one service, he cautiously asked the clerk how his sermon had been received, in particular whether it had been long enough. Upon being assured that it was, he admitted to the clerk that his dog had eaten some of the paper it was written on just before the service. "Couldn't you give our wicar a pup o' that 'ere dawg, sir?" was the punchline, in Welsh dialect. ApMadoc applied the lesson to some overly long musical compositions, but wondered whether the dogs might suffer indigestion from consuming paper.
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Wikipedia