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.”