Irrefutable Truth
June 19, 2009
The Housekeeper
June 19, 2009
The Greatest Gift
June 19, 2009
Larry King
June 19, 2009
Cars, Not Husbands
June 19, 2009
Wahoo!! Aloha Hawaii!
June 19, 2009
There’s A Difference?
June 19, 2009
‘Does That Mean Happy Father’s Day?’
June 19, 2009
The Obama Fly Swatter
June 19, 2009
Lady Liberty, Updated
June 19, 2009
The family dog: Why we treat our pets like royalty
June 19, 2009
BACK IN NOVEMBER 2007, Utah’s Deseret News wrote up a five-year-old Shih Tzu whose wardrobe included a pink mohair sweater and a fur-trimmed parka. The same month, the Arizona Republic reported on the growing popularity of puppy Tupperware parties. And in South Carolina, the Greenville News highlighted an increasingly common sight on local sidewalks: pet strollers. Such conveyances might have proved popular at the six Dallas-area malls that announced preholiday “pet nights,” where animals could sit for a picture with Santa.
Gilded-age indulgences that ended when recession officially arrived a month later? Hardly. According to the American Pet Products Association, the pet industry – which includes everything from old-fashioned kibble to new-age veterinary acupuncture – grew by $2 billion in 2008. For 2009, the association predicts $45 billion in sales. Fifteen years ago, that number was $17 billion. “We’re as recession-resistant as any industry I can think of,” declares Bob Vetere, the association’s president.
A century ago, the pioneering economist Thorstein Veblen lampooned the house pet as the ultimate emblem of conspicuous consumption, an “item of expense” with “no industrial purpose.” Veblen’s dim view isn’t so out of place among today’s cynics, either. Candidates for our era’s canine Marie Antoinette might include Trouble, the beloved Maltese who was willed $12 million by hotelier Leona Helmsley. From $5,000 Swiss chalet doghouses to $1,200 leashes inlaid with Swarovski crystal, critics have plenty of excesses to mock.
But for most of America’s 69 million pet-owning households, the changing treatment of pets isn’t a function of money. It’s a reflection of a century’s worth of deeper changes. The move from farm to city has meant many people no longer experience agriculture’s sometimes harsh, utilitarian model of human-animal interaction. The evolution of the middle class means more people can afford an animal that doesn’t have to work for its food – or become ours. Most of all, modern pet ownership has been transformed by our evolution in recent decades into a less connected, lonelier society. Four-legged companionship matters more than ever.
To scholars who study the human-animal bond as well as marketers who profit from it, those broad changes have given rise to the phenomenon of “humanization,” the modern tendency to see domestic animals less as beasts than as junior members of the family. And right along with that evolutionary promotion comes a new set of perceived responsibilities on the part of owners. Bring on the pet-food nutritonists, veterinary dermatologists, and professional dog groomers: Yesteryear’s consumer excess has become, in the favored phrase of pet-goods vendors, today’s “fur baby.”
Today’s pet owners “view their pets as full-fledged members of the family, with regard to which they would no more take lightly any serious cutbacks on spending than they would for their kids,” concluded a March market report from the consumer-research group Packaged Facts. A 2001 survey for the American Animal Hospital Association revealed that 83 percent of pet owners call themselves their animal’s “mommy” or “daddy.”
Passing The Torch
June 19, 2009
There’s Only So Much Change…
June 19, 2009
