Pampered Pets
Fascinating discussion of animal behvior and human-animal interaction for all of us dog and cat lovers in Newsweek--A Pampered Pet Nation. Downloadable, so read at your leisure, but read it you must.
This year we’ll shell out more than $40 billion to keep our furry friends fed, adorned, amused and healthy—the latter a huge growth category, with more and more owners paying top dollar for elaborate medical treatments to forestall that inevitable last visit to the vet. By the end of the decade, we’ll be spending $50 billion on pet products, according to the APPMA. Walk the aisles of Petco or PetSmart, past the Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses for your dog and the $140 Catnip Chaise Lounge for your cat, and you’ll discover just how well-trained we Americans have become. “I don’t know who’s been domesticated: the animals, or the humans?” says Jeff Corwin, Animal Planet’s globetrotting wildlife biologist....
But is all this coddling for our pets, or is it for us? A growing number of animal behaviorists, researchers and trainers think we’ve gone off the deep end, anthropomorphizing and infantilizing our pets to the point that we’ve forgotten an essential biological truth: at the level of basic instinct, Tabby is a wildcat and Fido is a wolf.
At msnbc.com
Read More in: Behavior | Cats | Dogs
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Posted by Super Cool Pets at June 2, 2007 8:37 AM
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