Fear is a great guard dog

Back to work after the long Christmas break and one of the first pieces of copy I sub contains this phrase:

Fear is a great guard dog but a very poor guide

This sounds like a proverb or a quotation, but if so it's a new one on me and Apus. It isn't listed in our reference books and Google fails to shed any light on it.

Anyone else out there heard this one before – or has one of our writers been reading too many horoscopes? Which reminds me: happy new year...

Not a great guard dog, unlike fear