[simulo]

These examples (dogs,cars...) are badly used in most programming books, but they can make sense if you show them in context of a small game or whatever else actually draws you an (inter) active virtual car or animal (which made OOP click for me, using processing). Printing "meow" and "woof" in the terminal, however, only makes sense as a demonstration if you already know what it should demonstrate.

[whstl]

True, but even for games we already have a much better technique for doing it: runtime composition, which isn't really taught.

The argument here is not so much that "implementation inheritance doesn't work at all" but rather that it is a limiting way of modeling that causes more problems than it solves, and teaching it is a problem in itself.

Implementation inheritance should be a footnote given with a warning, rather than a main technique.