Let me state for the record that I really like my dog, an 12-year-old cutie named Lulu. She plays a good game of fetch. She forces me to get a little more exercise with her constant need for walks. She has also mastered house-training (well, almost, but let’s not get into the details). But would I plan a big celebration for her on National Pet Day, which happens to be today?
Not on your freaking life. Lately it seems there are no limits to what we do for our four-legged friends. Some of us buy them a Louis Vuitton
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carrier. (Price tag? You don’t even want to guess.) Some of us have no qualms booking them a stay at luxury pet hotels that come complete with “in-suite television entertainment tuned to Animal Planet or DogTV.” And more and more of us subscribe to a high-end dog-food service. The basic cost of owning a dog, from food to poop bags to routine veterinary care, can easily top $2,000 a year. But add that Louis Vuitton bag to the mix and you might be spending more on your pet than you’d pay for a car. It’s all part of a trend to treat our pets like people. One study, from the Nielsen
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folks, noted that 95% of American pet owners consider their animals to be family members. Little wonder so many have us have taken to calling them our “fur babies.” But I don’t need a study to tell me that: I just have to look at all the pet owners I know who post more pictures of their dogs on Instagram
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than of their spouses, children and grandchildren — you know, their human family members. Speaking of which, consider this statistic from the folks at LendingTree: 28% of pet owners spend money specifically with those social-media posts in mind. You know, for important things like pet Halloween costumes. And for younger pet owners, as in Gen Zers, that figure increases to 47%. Which makes me want to head to the nearest dog park with a megaphone and announce: “FIDO DOESN’T CARE IF YOU DRESS HIM UP LIKE BATMAN!!!” This is not to say our canine and fe …