Late last month – I think it was just before the Civic Holiday weekend – I got a message on a net-serve account. A writer friend of mine was in a bit of a jam and she needed help. So she put out an all-points-bulletin to her writer colleagues for help on the Internet. Normally, this online service helps writers find editors, publishers, venues for reading and other aids that writing professionals require. Her call for help this time was a little unexpected.
“Anybody know where I can kennel my dog over the holiday weekend?” she asked.
She was off to the cottage and a wedding over the weekend and needed to find doggie lodgings in a hurry. I was intrigued by my friend’s Internet call for assistance. It made a lot of sense. I responded online making a suggestion or two, but ultimately she decided she’d take her dog along to the cottage and work out doggie-sitting arrangements later. By comparison, my writer friend’s dilemma paled to the problem my sister faced a week or so later. Suddenly her dog had a series of seizures. Living in Toronto, she had access to a kind of walk-in pet emergency clinic; she got the dog admitted and as quickly as a human gets attention in a hospital (perhaps sooner) a vet attended the dog, administered medication and even prescribed an MRI. Yikes!
If there was ever any question that our pets are becoming central to our lives, if not taking them over, there’s little question anymore. I did a little surfing for some statistics on the Internet and the stats back up that thesis. According to an Ipsos Reid poll, eight out of ten Canadians consider their pet a member of the family.
What’s perhaps even more telling in the survey is that four in ten Canadians think their pets are a viable replacement for human companions. And how do the pollsters know this? Well, apparently the pet owners surveyed generally talk to their pets a lot, allow their pets to sleep in their owners’ beds, have pictures of their favourite pet in their wallets, and just as readily tell stories about their pets to their friends. I guess that’s why my writer friend went online for a doggie-sitter.
It also occurred to me that with the ascension of the family pet to family member status, there must be a sizable cost attached. I never asked my sister what that MRI for her dog might have cost, but I know from our own vet bills (and I’m not complaining – professional help requires professional compensation) choosing to have pets in our lives is a financial as well as a time and emotional commitment.
Again, surveys bear this out. Most recent statistics indicate the pet industry generates $9 billion a year in Canada. If you’re curious, according to the American Pet Product Association, pet products and services in the U.S. generate nearly $50 billion annually.
I alluded to the emotional commitment of pet ownership. It too has a significant impact on people who choose to have pets as primary companions. We recently had an expert in dog behaviour make a house call. We have grandchildren around these days and we wanted to ensure that “man’s best friend” knows how to behave himself around the new arrivals. We learned that, like everything else in the pet-human equation, it’s up to us to invest the additional time, retraining and of course money to ensure everybody’s safety.
But commitment to a pet can be dangerous to your health too. Another story came to me this week. A friend in Calgary was walking her dog by a river alone. She was suddenly distracted and discovered her dog barking on the far side of the river. Instinctively, she forded the river, got her dog safely back on the near bank, but then found herself caught in a strong current floating downstream. She forced herself not to panic and just made it ashore, but realized the river could have swept her away and no one would have known why.
Our household pets – a frail old cat and a middle-aged Kerry blue terrier – are fortunate to have animal-sitting services just steps away. We occasionally rely on a service in town to drop by to care for the animals when we’re away for a day or two.
But our neighbour is so tuned in to our comings and goings that she regularly bails out the Kerry blue if he’s ever stuck in our home alone. In fact, it’s come to the point that he feels as much at home next door as he does here in our household. And truthfully, I think she considers him as much a part of her family as we think of him part of ours.
And if my dog has read the statistics, and I wouldn’t put it past him, he’s taking full advantage of his dual citizenship.