Happy Pet Parents Day
by Michael Schaffer

This Sunday marks America’s second annual commemoration of Pet Parents’ Day, a Hallmark-card holiday marking our newfangled relationship with our pets.

As it happens, I’m especially into Pet Parents’ Day because it represents the basic phenomenon I’m chronicling in my book: How Man’s Best Friend was promoted to America’s Fur Baby. That change underlies all the once-crazy things I write about in the book: The space-age vet technology, the impassioned legal fights about pet-death liability, the pet fashion shows and six-figure professional dog-walkers and feline accpuncture specialists and pet social networkers and pet-food nutrition activists. None of that dedication would focus on the beast who’s consigned to live in the dog house out back. For the member of the family who snoozes at the foot of our own beds? That’s another story.

You can’t have Pet Parents’ Day without considering pets as something akin to four-legged kids.  

My favorite piece of evidence of this comes from a stroll through an old pet cemetery. The oldest graves will say things like “A Loyal Servant.” Pretty soon, there’s a jump to “Man’s Best Friend.” Nowadays, chiseled on headstones or preserved on some of the many many online pet tribute websites, it’s “Mommy and Daddy Miss You,” or “My Little Girl.” The pet’s the same loveable animal as ever, of course. But my how we humans have changed.