Pet Peeves

(RNS) My mother was a gold mine of practical advice. She used to warn us, "There are two things for which you will never be forgiven--criticizing people's children or their pets."

She included the latter category because of her hunch that the measure of a person's loss could be found in the size of emotional investment in his or her dog or cat. If this is true, the misery of America may be the subtext of a recent story in The New York Times.

	What luxury items have you bought for your pet(s)? Specialty food Clothing Treatments (spas, acupuncture, psychotherapy, etc.) Cosmetic services (dentistry or specialty grooming) I pay for the basics only View Results Pampered Pets Photo Gallery

The story sounded like something out of the civil rights era: a crowd of 500 people chanting as they banged on the windows of a meeting to restrict what they considered their rights.

This was not, however, about the franchise to vote but rather about forbidding dogs from running free on national park land. Their rumbling demand was not "Freedom Now" but "No leashes! No leashes!"

It would be easy to poke gentle fun at this saga of the social ascent of American dogs to a position in which they "get braces for their teeth and antidepressants for anxiety and attend the church of their owner's choice," as the newspaper put it.

So, too, were there not the hint of an emotional chasm beneath their protests, one could lampoon and dismiss claims that "ordinances banning certain breeds of animals are the equivalent of racial profiling of dogs."

Enormous emotional demands are made on dogs by the "three-fourths of pet owners (who) consider their animals akin to children" and the majority of surveyed women who "said they relied more on their dogs or cats for affection than on their husbands."

These reports constitute what social scientists term "unobtrusive measures," indicators that incidentally tell us a truth that they are not designed to measure.

Thus a checkbook tells, better than we could, what we did, where we were, and what our priorities may be.

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