go to the dogs

1. (idiomatic) To decline or deteriorate shockingly.
   • 1874, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ch. 42:

     "[T]he merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcase, they have!"

   • 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter L, in The Moon and Sixpence. A Novel, London: William Heinemann, OCLC 563525353 ↗; The Moon and Sixpence, 1st American edition, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers by arrangement with George H. Doran Company, 1919, OCLC 365836 ↗, page 264 ↗:

     Poor devil, he's gone to the dogs altogether. He's got some twopenny-halfpenny job in the medical at Alexandria—sanitary officer or something like that. I'm told he lives with an ugly old Greek woman and has half a dozen scrofulous kids.

   • 2002 February 3, Evan Thomas, "Bring Back the Exploding Cigars ↗" (review of See No Evil by Robert Baer), New York Times (retrieved 17 Feb 2018):

     "The C.I.A. was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism and much more." . . . Baer, who quit the agency four years ago, says he is angry about all this, but he clearly has a good time recounting how the C.I.A. went to the dogs.

• go to pot, go downhill; go to shit (vulgar)

• French: aller à vau-l'eau
• German: vor die Hunde gehen
• Italian: andare a male, andare a rotoli
• Russian: пойти́ по́ миру
• Spanish: irse al diablo , al traste