Picked, perked or pricked up?

I hear and read these three words used in the same context in English, but is one of them more correct than the others?

"The witch's cat picked up his ears"

"Last year, when Mahmout heard that EGA would pay for several thousand mules for Greece, he perked up his ears."

"As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears."

Solution 1:

Possibly there are dialectal contexts for picked and perked, but so far as I'm concerned they look like mistakes made by people who simply misheard or misremembered the original and correct pricked up.

Feasibly someone might pick up if they've been poorly, though I would normally expect that to be perk up anyway. Certainly in general to perk up just means to become more lively, and you can't apply it as a verb to your ears.

From OED: prick noun - a sharp point or spur, from which among various other meanings of the verb form, to prick up - to rise or stand erect with the point directed upward; to point or stick up. This usage has been around since at least 1775 - [the horse] pricked up his ears.

Here's an NGram showing that only pricked up is really used.

Solution 2:

Pricked up is all I'd ever heard growing up and almost always related to our horses---I hadn't heard "perked up his/her ears...." until recently and it's always sounded out of place. When you watch a horse become suddenly alert but not frightened, it does indeed tend to "prick up (its) ears", during which the tips certainly do point skyward! Not sure how perked up would look with a horse's ears.....more perky? I've heard that used describing women's breasts but not sure it was meant to imply looking like skyward pointing horse's ears----except maybe in old TV/catalog bra commercials from the late fifties or early sixties?.....always seemed a bit uncomfortable, but perhaps that's just naïve, and also perhaps not as uncomfortable as hearing "perk up her ears" or "pick up his ear(s)"....didn't work for VV Gogh either, evidently (sorry, painful, inappropriate).