Aphorism for ownership

So, I have this expression from Portuguese that says that "A dog with two owners dies of hunger"

It has the main objective of expressing that if you assign more than one person to take care of something (usually a problem), they'll all think that the other one will take care of it and end up doing nothing.

Is there anything similar in English? I thought about "Too many cooks spoil the broth" but it doesn't have the same intrinsic message - this one comes across to me that if you have too many people taking care of the same thing, there will be too much done and in the end it will get bad from EXCESS of action, while the Portuguese saying has the underlying meaning of neglect.


There are a lot of expressions that don't quite make it.

"A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two is never quite sure." Does not quite get it since it talks about one owner and two possessions instead.

"Too many cooks spoil the broth." Again, it's not quite the same. Overly competitive chefs getting in each other's way is not the same as forgetting to feed the dog. With two chefs the dog might eat badly prepared food but he would eat.

"Go ask your mother. Go ask your father." It's almost getting it. Here each parent is pushing responsibility to the other parent.

"Next window please." That almost gets it, but it's often straight-up lazy or straight-up nastiness rather than the idea that the clerk thinks another clerk really will do the job. Or it's just that the clerk really is going on his scheduled lunch break.


I'm not sure if it qualifies as an "aphorism", but an awful lot of people have observed that...

When/If everyone is responsible [then] no one is responsible


The British English expression "to fall between two stools" usually means to vascillate between two courses of action but it can also mean to be neither one thing nor another as shown by this Longman's dictionary entry which defines the phrase as

to be neither one type of thing nor another, or be unable to choose between two ways of doing something

I believe this carries a similar connotation to the Portuguese proverb. The only difference is that the Portuguese does suggest that each owner will leave the feeding of the dog to the other whereas the British phrase is less blame laden.


A baby with seven nannies has lost its eye (or without an eye).