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DOG DAYS
This is a great time to be canine. After all, dogs are the new kids.

Text: TIM TAYLOR

IN SOME RESPECTS IT'S JUST LIKE ANY OTHER SPA/HOTEL. Some clients sit under hair dryers. Others relax in the lounge. Still others indulge in luxurious baths followed by a manicure. But something sets this place apart – something of broader cultural significance. Perhaps it’s the barking.

The New York Dog Spa & Hotel. I’m staying up on 55th in Midtown and I’m thinking of moving down here. But no luck. Owner Naresh Jessani tells me they have all kinds of clients: mutts, purebreds, celebrity dogs and rescued greyhounds. "There’s no class system with dogs," he laughs. But they draw the line at humans.

The Spa is nicely appointed in a handsome old building on West 18th Street in the trendy Chelsea neighbourhood. After a city-wide post-9/11 slowdown, business is now brisk enough again to justify expansion to a second facility on West 25th. This location is even nicer, with a long, ornate check-in desk and stairs sweeping up to the mezzanine veterinarian’s office. It strikes you as the swankiest possible canine hostelry, even in this city. But it isn’t.

"We’re a Marriott," says Naresh. "Comfortable and affordable. Sure, if we charged $75 a day we could serve the dogs Evian water, but that’s not our market." No, that would be the Ritz Canine’s market, where at $250 a night your dog gets a private suite with VCR and a rooftop solarium, where he can stroll the English garden and lap purified water from a bubbling fountain.

New York City is dog city. They’re everywhere. A very self-possessed variety of urban canine. Border collies gossiping outside Dean & DeLuca. A Jack Russell on the boulevard of Park Avenue, oblivious to traffic. Of course, it’s not just New York. As in so many areas, the Big Apple is only the pinnacle expression of the urban state of things. Dogs are hot in cities across North America.

In 1997, the American Veterinary Medical Association estimated that there were 53 million dogs in the United States alone. According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, that number has now grown to 68 million. And while the economy is rebounding, the "gay" dollar gets stronger and consumer demand seeks an outlet, North American human birth rates have plummeted. It’s not difficult to see the burgeoning canine middle class as an enormous four-legged market opportunity.

Indeed, the doggy goods and services sector is booming continent-wide, manifesting itself in an explosion of consumer options. Dog hotels, yes. But also holistic dog-care clinics, walkers and portrait artists for hire, freelance canine-massage therapists. Check out your local bookstore in the pets section and tell me if you remember dog-paw reflexology charts being available five years ago. Which leads me to ask, are dogs the next loci of consumer indulgence in a middle-class world of babyless houses and unallocated disposable income? Are they being elevated to the status of consumers in their own right? And given that they drink out of the toilet bowl, could it be that we are losing our collective minds?

Dr. Stanley Coren doesn’t think so. Coren is a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the mega-bestseller The Intelligence of Dogs, which teaches us, among other things, that dogs are as smart as 2- to 3-year-olds. I ask him whether or not – when dogs are wearing Burberry raincoats and going to laser tag nights at the local doggie gym – some kind of shift in the human-canine balance of power is going on.

"It’s not a recent thing at all," he reassures me, describing a long, noble history of dog pampering. Pharaohs slept with their dogs. Chinese emperors put diamond collars on theirs. Queen Victoria allegedly served her collie tea out of a saucer.

But these are aristocrats. What’s happening to the great unwashed rest of us? Dr. Coren’s more recent book points the way. A serious how-to manual, How to Speak Dog culminates in a phrase book of 80 different dog sounds and expressions ("yowel-owel-wowel" means "this is great"). It’s a clear shift away from my imperious expectation that my Labrador retriever Buster learn my language: Sit. Stay. Get out of the dishwasher.

Coren doesn’t buy my point that there has been an elevation in the status of dogs. "If anything," he says carefully, "I’d say the dog’s status has slipped. In the old days, dogs were working animals. A dog was needed because it had special skills and that gave them real status. Now, we put up with them being young, needy babies for the rest of their lives."

Babies. The key word, seemingly, in any discussion of the pet’s place in society. Talk to people in the burgeoning canine service sector and the concept of the dog as the new child comes up very quickly. "Seventy percent of people refer to their dogs as their children and to themselves as parents," Naresh says, citing an on-line poll.

"People are having fewer children and working more and more," adds Julie Anne Lee, founder of the Adored Beast Veterinary Clinic in Vancouver. "When they come home, the dog is a big social part of their lives, literally a member of the family."

Lee should know. The homeopathic Adored Beast has been an enormous success in the four years since it was founded, an emblem of the new familial relationship between people and their pets. Starting with the 11/2-hour initial consultation with Lee and a conventional veterinarian, taking your dog to Adored Beast is not your typical visit to the vet. Soft music, paper room dividers, racks of products like ostrich-oil moisturizing soap, dermal spray made with lavender and grape-seed extract. The clinic captures the spirit of high-minded consumerism you find at the Body Shop or Lush, and wraps it in the earthy, reassuring aesthetic of an organic health-food store.

There is also a lingering sense that important wrongs must be righted on behalf of our canine children. Take dog kibble, of which Lee is deeply critical. She believes that dogs should be eating raw meat like their ancestors. It’s an easier concept to grasp than it is to implement. The 30-day diet cycle in the book Lee gives out calls for beef, egg, turkey necks, carrots, yams, celery, parsley and garlic on Saturday followed by a fast on Sunday. Monday morning starts up with turkey, egg, potato, carrots, dandelions, squash and ginger. There are store-bought solutions, but they’re pricey. In the freezer of my local pet store I find one-meal packets of hormone-free ostrich, bison, chicken and beef mixed with veggies, ground raw bones, olive oil and something called Flack’s Ultrakelp. A woman leaving the shop with two panniers full of frozen dog meals says, with a mixture of pride and weariness, "It costs more to feed my dog than to feed me."

It’s the kind of sacrifice that you would make on behalf of a child. But, according to some, a sacrifice that misses the mark. Scott Taylor is the founder of Hollywood North Canine Training and Talent Agency in Vancouver. He’s been training dogs for the movies and commercials for over a decade, and his dogs work on kibble. It’s not that he doesn’t have a sense of human duty toward dogs. But his focus is squarely on education. Your dog may be your kid, fine. You may want to spend an hour making them dinner every night, fine. But if you’re treating them like children, like full-fledged members of the family, then surely you should be sending these dogs to school. "You’d teach a 2-year-old kid not to run into the street, wouldn’t you?" Taylor asks.

According to Purina, the dog-chow giant, fully 81 percent of dog owners have never taken their dog for obedience training of any kind. Of course, it’s a lot easier to treat a dog as a consumer-indulgence opportunity than to accept responsibility for its behaviour.

The belief that dogs require training no doubt stems from Taylor’s association with working dogs. "It used to be that all dogs were taught to bring the slippers," Taylor reminds me. "Now, all too often, the dog is this neurotic entity that has no comprehension of what it’s supposed to be doing."

I’m thinking about this back in New York as I watch the uncanny self-possession of dogs at the Washington Square Park dog run. The place is packed with a crazy urban mix of breeds, sizes and temperaments. Two Rotties are wrestling with a Vizsla. A Doby cross meditates, eyes closed, sniffing the air. A pug is snoozing in a planter, emitting little raspberry snores. Sirens and jackhammers echo from around the square, but, here, overall peace and calm prevail. Maybe in a city this busy, this crowded, this rich, where Weimaraners on Lexington are wearing $6,000 Aran wool sweaters and Chows line up for Reiki under the skylight at the Ritz Canine, these Washington Square Park dogs illustrate that urban dogs have a critical job to do – that none of them are unemployed.

It’s reflected in the faces of their owners. The aging rocker in his skinny jeans. The natty gent in the alpine green blazer. The two rapper dudes with their chains and Timberlands and their debate about the merits of the Portuguese Water Dog. At one point, looking around at the ring of faces on the benches, I note that every person in the run is staring at their dog and either smiling openly or laughing aloud. Forty or 50 strangers standing in a public park and laughing helplessly as every dog in the park decides to become a stand-up comic all at once. And as a nearby flute busker reaches a mad climax, the jackhammers fall silent for the briefest instant and starlings burst suddenly out of the trees in a cloud, wings like applause, disappearing up into the whitish sky. The dogs look pleased with themselves. They crack grins at one another, go back to their licking and lolling, their doggy kibitzing. And I have to give them credit. After all, you know what they say: Pulling a sled is easy, comedy is hard.