The main goal of this paper is to attempt to apply some of the key constructs of cognitive semantics to the analysis of conventionalized English animal similes. It will combine Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the Theory of Conceptual Blending (BT) in the analysis of 48 examples (similes or groups of similes) from English, belonging to the corpus compiled from the major dictionaries of idioms. The examples will be divided into three main groups, based on their sources, motivation and the level of objectivity and the analysis will try to prove that the understanding of each of these groups will employ a different set-up of cognitive mechanisms.