These are the proverbial dog days of summer, so named not because of how doggone tired you feel in the stifling heat but because Sirius, the bright Dog Star, rises at almost the same time as the sun every day between July 3 and Aug. 11.
But really, can you name a day that isn’t a dog day? Some dogs eat more exotically than most humans, quaffing such chow as ostrich ground meat or processed kangaroo. (Ugh.) There are, astonishingly, numerous Blue Apron-like food subscription services for dogs. Forget Alpo — The Pets Table offers “human-grade fresh and gently air-dried options” with “added postbiotic to support gut health.”
A quick drop-in at the pet store exposes one to outlandish accessories, including suspender dog boots (“boots that stay on”) from Canada Pooch and TropiClean’s Mild Coconut Ear Cleaning Wipes that “gently lifts away wax and debris, while reducing ear odor.” For a mere $800, you can buy “the World’s First Smart Dog Treadmill,” which, sadly for Fido, obviates the organic pleasures of a plein air walk — sniffing hindquarters and irrigating fire hydrants.
The What Dogs Want Academy in Phoenix offers dog enrichment programs, which purport to revitalize tired canine brain cells lost by “young animals who live in sterile environments.” A full-day class costs $80, just a fraction of the $300 price tag of a 10-pound bag of ground ostrich.
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A session at the academy is like encouraging grandpa to solve crosswords to keep him out of his retirement community’s memory care unit.
Dogs live generally unburdened lives with ample time for rest and relaxation. Now we learn that they plan to outlive us. A company called Loyal has raised $125 million to develop a longevity pill “to improve age-related metabolic decline in senior dogs,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
With a multiplier effect of seven (one human year equals seven dog years), how can they possibly fail?
Dogs have been on a heady run of late, no pun intended. According to data from the American Veterinary Medical Association, the pet dog population in the United States increased from 76 million to between 83 million and 88 million from 2016 to 2020. Where 38 percent of American households used to shelter a dog, now 45 percent do.
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Dogs’ gains have come at the expense of their traditional nemesis, the cat. The same AVMA report notes that the overall cat population increased by only 2 million to 3 million, and that there are about 20 million more pet dogs in US homes than cats.
This represents a profound cultural shift, from cat America to dog America. Writing in The Atlantic magazine, Cullen Murphy noted in 1987 that the Pet Food Institute cited a dramatic reversal in US pet ownership. Dogs, which had outnumbered cats during the 1970s, had ceded the high ground to their feline rivals. The PFI said Americans owned 56 million cats, compared to 52 million dogs.
Murphy noted that dog America “was a place of nuclear or extended families, of someone always home, of children (or pet) looked after during the day by a parent (or owner), of open spaces and family farms, of sticks and leftovers, of expansiveness and looking outward … it was the America of Willa Cather and Lassie and Leon Leonwood Bean.”
The resurgent cat America, he opined, “is a place of working men and women with not much time, of crowded cities, of apartment buildings with restrictive clauses, of day-care and take-out food, of self-absorption and modest horizons” etc., etc. Thus kind of urban, kind of Democrat.
The Republican nominee for vice president, JD Vance, has reinforced this view, venturing his (frankly vile) opinion that Vice President Kamala Harris, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are “childless cat ladies” who “want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
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But now the pointer is facing the other way. Lassie has come home. Our future, for better or worse, looms like an endless line of dog days, stretching to the horizon.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot.
