What’s the Use of Pets?

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/336

As you glide down over central Florida into Orlando International Airport, the Earth glitters up at you as if strewn with diamonds. The lush, landscaped grounds of the airport are ringed, like much of the Sunshine State, with a circlet of man-made lakes.

“All this was once swamp,” the driver of the Mears private van—Florida’s idea of mass transit—tells me. We pass a sign for Boggy Creek Road. “They built canals and retention ponds to drain it and built the airport on top.” We pass a rectangular lake crisscrossed with overhead tracks from which cables tow waterskiers in mechanized circuits. We pass a billboard announcing Shamu’s All-New Show. Traffic slows to a crawl because this is the highway to Disneyland, and the driver switches to unfurling a fairly comprehensive, if unattributed, recap of An Inconvenient Truth. I’m trying to look involved, but I’m eavesdropping on two people behind me who are discussing the Zone Diet for dogs. By the time the driver gets to Florida’s disappearance under rising sea levels—an outcome I can’t bring myself to regret just at this moment—the folks in the back have switched to discussing hip replacement surgery for dogs.

There are two conventions at the Orange County Convention Center this week. One is a whirlpool spa exhibition. The other, the one we are headed to, is Global Pet Expo 2007, an annual trade show sponsored by the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association (APPMA). Here, the makers of food, supplies, vitamins, toys, services, and furniture—yes, furniture—for pets put their wares on display in the hopes that the five-thousand-plus buyers attending will adopt them for their stores.

The U.S. pet industry is booming. The trade-show press conference unleashes the new stats: 63 percent of American households now include a companion animal, a number steadily on the rise. This year, for the first time, Americans are expected to shell out over $40 billion on pets and associated costs, more than double what they spent in 1994. Nothing—not September 11, not recession, not war in Iraq or rising seas lapping at the convention center gates—seems likely to hinder this cash-flow juggernaut. As Bob Vetere, president of the APPMA, puts it, “This industry is unbelievable.”

[Virginia Dare]

1. Better question: What's the use of humans?...n/t

[papau]

2. Most folks like pets more than they like other people because pets forget/ forgive, and just love n/

n/t

[tomreedtoon]

4. So pets are for people who can't deal with people. Right.

Everybody I've known who's ever owned a pet had lousy relations with human beings. On the other hand, people who get along well with people don't need or want pets.

See a pet? The person's a mental crip.

[papau]

5. Alternative interpretation is that those with pets are the wise one who know how to

enjoy life - and know that few enjoy fighting with other people, or even competing with other people for prises that are not worth the contest.

There is a lot to be said for having a happy life - and for some that means preferring pets to being around smug aggressive assh-les.

[trusty elf]

7. step on no pets!

[msedano]

3. fool's story

i share this poem with kids who whine they want a pet. once a person's ready to understand the thought, they're ready to accept the responsibility.

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939). The Wild Swans at Coole. 1919.

38. Two Songs of a Fool


I

A SPECKLED cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence 5
As I look up to Providence.

I start out of my sleep to think
Some day I may forget
Their food and drink;
Or, the house door left unshut, 10
The hare may run till it’s found
The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I 15
That am a wandering witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities?

II

I slept on my three-legged stool by the fire,
The speckled cat slept on my knee; 20
We never thought to enquire
Where the brown hare might be,
And whether the door were shut.
Who knows how she drank the wind
Stretched up on two legs from the mat, 25
Before she had settled her mind
To drum with her heel and to leap:
Had I but awakened from sleep
And called her name she had heard,
It may be, and had not stirred, 30
That now, it may be, has found
The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.


http://www.bartelby.org/148/38.html


mvs

http://labloga.blogspot.com
http://readraza.com

[yellowcanine]

6. Here is one take on this....Pets are good for mental health and also help us stay fit.

http://www.head-cleaners.com/petsupport.html