You Are Now Free to Move Your Pet Around the Country
by Michael Schaffer

The all-animal Pet Airways is just preparing to take off this summer, but already they have a low-cost competitor. It’s not, alas, another pets-only carrier: It’s Southwest, the airline that first brought discount no-frills vacations to the two-legged set. From the airline’s blog this morning:

 We are very pleased to welcome pets onboard our aircraft for the very first time as part of a new program called P.A.W.S. (Pets Are Welcome on Southwest).  We will begin allowing our Customers to bring along a limited number of small cats and dogs in the aircraft cabin for a low pet fare of $75 each way.  Our Employees and our Customers have told us for years that this is something that they want from Southwest, and our enhanced boarding allows us to offer this new service without impacting the efficiency of our operation.  Customers can begin purchasing tickets for their pets on June 1, 2009, for travel beginning June 17, 2009.

And for those flying to Houston, my pal Mary informs that the airport there now boasts its own “pet relief area,” joining Phoenix and a handful of others in creating the permanent infrastructure for a nation of travelling pets.

Pet Insurance
by Michael Schaffer

I’ve written a bit recently about veterinary insurance. But what about pet car insurance? In a sign of the times, four different car-insurance firms have added a new, free come-on to lure customers: Coverage for pets riding in the car who might have been injured in an accident. 

From Dogster’s blog:

If you don’t have an insurance company that covers your pet in case of a car accident you can file a claim under property damage. However, what a company considers legitimate property damage may very well not include pet injuries. There’s a good chance the claim will be denied.

Read the whole thing here.

Pet Food Recall News
by Michael Schaffer

The massive class-action lawsuits stemming from the 2007 pet food poisoning scandal were more than just a chance to get some justice for the unknown hundreds of pets who died from melamine-tainted food. It was also another skirmish in a low-level legal battle with major implications for pet owners and the people who sell them things. The big question: Should the legal system  treat pets the way many contemporary Americans do–ie, as family members?

If your family member is killed due to someone’s negligence, you can ask for emotional damages as part of the wrongful death lawsuit. The same doesn’t go for your best friend, or, for that matter, for man’s best friend. Thus a wrongful pet-death suit is treated like any old property-destruction suit. The most you can usually ask for is how much it cost to adopt and train a pet–a puny some, in most cases. Critics say that knowing they’ll never be on the hook for big bucks encourages vets and firms who make things like pet food to behave irresponsibly. The counter-argument is that remaking pet-law in the image of malpractice law will lead to higher costs and a shortage of vets.

In the past few years, there’s been some give on the prohibition against emotional-distress claims for pets. A small number of states allow it, but with a very low ceiling–$4,000, I believe, in Tennessee. For the most part, the legal system recognizes the changed role of pets in our lives by occasionally socking it to someone who has been cruel or cavalier. There was, for instance, a six-figure verdict won by a Kentucky woman whose horses had been killed. But in those cases, the money is technically being given because of the vileness of the killing, not the bonds between human and animal. If someone sued the Glenn Close character from Fatal Attraction, say, the big bucks might flow because boiling someone’s rabbit is a traumatizing thing for the human, rather than because the little girl will be deprived of her pet’s companionship.

As it turned out, the pet food lawsuits didn’t change this status quo–which was the main objective of the pet food companies, petrified of a future full of loss-of-companionship suits. But all the same, the settlement showed a certain openness about damages: People could ask to be reimbursed for medical tests, lost work time, carpet cleaning, grief counseling, etc. It’s a good bet the manufacturer of a product that ruined hundreds of iPods would never have agreed to such terms. So, in that way, at least, the courts recognized that pets weren’t just property. 

Anyway, VIN News this week indicates that the settlement is still stuck in court, because at least a few parties think the terms screw over the families of the deceased. So, who knows, history may yet me made. Read the whole story here.

Balancing the Budget on the Back of Our Pets?
by Michael Schaffer

States across the country are facing enormous budget pressures due to the financial crisis. In most places, that has meant some combination of proposed spending cuts and proposed tax hikes. It’s an ugly season.

And among the unpopular proposals out there, one that seems an especially dubious political proposition is Maine’s push to increase the tax on…pet food.

A lot of pols would instinctively stay away from this kind of bill. Everyone hates tax hikes. Everyone loves puppies. Ergo, bad news for anyone seeking reelection sometime in the next century. No wonder the state’s governor is opposed.

But it it bad public policy? I don’t think so.

State Sen. John Nutting says the proceeds from the levy will go to paying for animal welfare programs–costs that have increased for a bunch of reasons, including a spike in pet abandonment caused by the recession and a new focus on busting puppy mills, something that reflects a modern ethic of humane pet production but costs money all the same. Previously, animal-welfare funds were collected by pet licensing fees. The problem is, lots of people avoid buying pet licenses. Short of having Pine Tree State troopers checking dog-tags from Kennebunkport to Augusta–which costs money, too, not to mention distracting the police from more important duties–this probably represents the best way to raise the necessary funds from that part of the population that disproportionately benefits from/causes government animal-welfare spending.

From the Bangor Daily News’ story:

“The scenario is to distribute the cost of animal welfare — which is just going to be getting bigger and is not going away — among more companion animal owners,” said Sen. Richard Nass, R-Acton, who was on a working group studying the problem and raised the idea with the ACF committee.

He said the state has a serious animal welfare problem. With every “puppy mill” that is raided where animals are seized because of the lack of health and safety, the seriousness of the problem is underscored, he said.

“We have had a long history of failed attempts at solving this problem,” Nass said. “There was the attempt to require registering of cats, and that was a big failure.”

Nutting agreed and said the committee had looked at several proposals for raising various licensing fees but came back to the issue that some dog owners and dog kennel owners are paying most of the cost of animal welfare programs that care for all types of pets.

“There are less than 50 percent of the people that actually choose to license their dogs,” Nutting said. “We need to have more people paying to support these programs.”

Frustratingly, the news accounts don’t say how much money Maine expects to make from raising the tax on pet food from five to six percent. But anyone who’s read my book One Nation Under Dog can tell you: A lot more than they would have twenty years ago. These days, it’s a $16.2-billion-a-year business, and customers who once bought Alpo at Safeway now buy lines like the $100-per-11lb-bag raw New Zealand lamb food from ZiwiPeak.

Many Pets Allowed
by Michael Schaffer

The folks at DogFriendly.com have a new list out of America’s top 10 dog-friendly cities. A lot of them are places I visited while reporting One Nation Under Dog: There’s San Francisco (#1), where the right to let your dog romp in the park became a cause celebre in city politics; there’s Austin (#2), whose high-tech firms have nothing on the cool pet-toy manufacturer I spent a memorable week visiting; there’s Chicago (#7), where I attended an animal-law meeting at which panelists argued for treating wrongful pet-death lawsuits like wrongful child-death lawsuits; there’s San Diego (#8), where the local shelter has a popular coffee shop and even the Major League Baseball team plays in a stadium named PetCo Park; and there’s New York (#9), where I attended both Pet Fashion Week and the annual Chihuahua Christmas Party.

Alas, Philadelphia, where a waitress just brought Murphy his own personal bowl of water (”Saint Bernard sized,” she said) while I ate a bagel on a beautiful May Saturday morning, didn’t make the list. I love it here, but our reputation doesn’t necessarily lend itself to being either human-friendly or pet-friendly. That’s a bad rap, of course, but most locals wouldn’t admit to being the sweethearts they actually are.

(Hat tip: http://www.travelingthegreenway.com)

Pet Economy Purrs Along
by Michael Schaffer

…But don’t take the word of a guy who just wrote a book about the growth of America’s romance with its four-legged family members. Check out this report from Businessweek:

Animal Law
by Michael Schaffer

 

 
“I fight for your rights as a human being! I’ve sued over 2,000 canines, and I’m willing to do it for you!”

When I wrote in One Nation Under Dog that the number of law schools offering animal law had skyrocketed, and that the four-legged legal scene now featured postmodern arguments about whether or not to apply previously humans-only loss-of-companionship benefits to cases of wrongful pet death, this Will Ferrell sketch from last week’s Saturday Night Live wasn’t what I was talking about. But Ferrell’s star turn as Wade Blasingame, who won $4,000 from a dog as punishment for sniffing someone’s crotch, is pretty awesome all the same. Read the transcript here.

Dogs and Gentrification
by Michael Schaffer

Time was when independent coffee shops and low-rent art galleries represented the green shoots of revitalization in a blighted neighborhood. Nowadays, someone wondering where to open up a new Belgian bistro might do well to look for well-tended dog parks. That’s the argument of a story in my old newspaper, which hits a theme I look at pretty extensively in One Nation Under Dog: The class dimensions of petkeeping.

People up and down the economic ladder love pets, but the forms of that love have long varied. The sociologist Elijah Anderson, in a nearly 20-year-old book about another transitioning Philadelphia neighborhood, riffs on how the old-line, African American blue-collar population, including pet-owners too, were aghast that yuppie newcomers would let their dogs kiss them in the face. What we think of as gross, of course, is culturally determined, and in this case it was a way of teasing out new from old.  

What goes for doggie kisses also goes, in the new age of pet largesse I’ve spent the past few years describing, for willingness to pay for a local dog park, willingness to buy healthy pet food at a new upscale boutique, and ability to have a pet living in full family splendor. In fact, in emerging neighborhoods, pets–and the walking and park-visiting they require–are part and parcel of emerging neighborliness. The Inquirer story, in fact, notes how the local pet boutique chain Doggie Style has adopted a policy of opening stores in small, blossoming neighborhoods, precisely because knowing the local pet business is such a piece of many pet owners’ lifestyles.

Social Networking and Pet Planes
by Michael Schaffer

Here’s an interesting article about the use of online social networking to sell pet gear–from flights on the startup pet airways to a new line of kitty litter.

Like Pet Airways, Feline Pine, an all-natural kitty litter, has sponsored a new cat blog that is aimed at raising money for animals in shelters.


The blog, Romeothecat.com, follows the life of Romeo, a cat who was adopted from a shelter and is now working to raise money to help other animals find homes and proper care. Each month, it runs a Furpower Donation Challenge, in which viewers are called to send in their pet photos and stories and a $1 donation, which is then given to a selected pet friendly charity or service. Feline Pine sponsors the competition and runs ads.


“People that go to the site are people that love their cats and are people who are spending time thinking about the products that they buy for their cats,” said Bob Shaw, CEO of Concentric Marketing, the agency that works with Feline Pine. “The goal of Romeo is to build a community of people that are engaged and interested in the travails of these cats and as a sponsor, it gives [Feline Pine] a way to be a very grassroots brand.”


Feline Pine has found that connecting with pet fans in this social way to be more meaningful and relevant than through traditional advertising. 


“Social media is so great when you have that kind of psychographic target that you have on Romeo the cat,” said Shaw. “Targeting people who are cat indulgent can be difficult to do through traditional media, and what social networking does is allow the cat audience to find us.”


 

Check the whole thing out here.

Life is Ruff
by Michael Schaffer

I have a new piece in May’s Philadelphia Magazine profiling the couple behind PetPlan USA, one of the competitors in one sector of the pet industry that’s booming because of–and not in spite of–the recession: Pet insurance. 

Petplan’s offices sit, somewhat improbably, in a 1960s office park opposite Philadelphia International Airport. You might imagine that International Plaza is full of people shipping machine tools to distant corners of the globe or ordering up tons of raw materials in return. And then you remember that Philadelphia doesn’t really trade in machine tools or industrial raw materials anymore.

In fact, Petplan’s story highlights Philadelphia’s current economic strengths, such as they are. First there was Wharton, where Chris and Natasha’s classmates included not just financiers, but people with actual actuarial experience. Teaming up with two of them, they won the school’s annual business-plan competition in 2003, positing that there was a better way to sell pet insurance. Research was made particularly convenient by their proximity to another unique local resource, Penn’s Matthew J. Ryan veterinary hospital, which has been called the Mayo Clinic of the pet world. The hospital let the business students rummage through reams of data. 

Taking the idea from grad-school triumph to real proved tricky: The Ashtons and their contest teammates quickly split up  —  the other pair moved to Cleveland and started their own pet-insurance firm, Embrace. By staying in Philly, Petplan’s founders were able to benefit from a third local institution: Hill, the founder of Commerce Bank, who, over the past decade, has emerged as Philadelphia’s major doggie benefactor. Devoted to a Yorkshire terrier named Duffy, Hill endowed a new building at Penn’s veterinary school, opened the doors of Commerce branches to four-legged visitors, and led an annual pet parade through Rittenhouse Square. “Pets have become our kids,” says Hill. “And there’s no limit to what we will pay to keep our pets healthy.

Read the whole thing here.