Free Dog and I by Roy Macgregor

also pet and rub your puppy’s ears.”
    New York Dog seems just a tad brassier, especially when your eye catches the cover stories: “374 Hot Looks,” “Desperate House Dogs,” and “Is My Dog Bi-Polar?” This magazine is far more into apparel than Modern Dog, from leather designer carrying bags to designer paw wear and more bling than Mr. T. would dare wear were he purebred rather than pure ham. “Diamond Dogs,” reads one full-page ad from The Gilded Paw, “… when it’s more than love.”
    The most functional-looking collar in the magazine is a specially designed unit to put an end to the lost dog. It has a built-in Global Positioning System so that the owner can track the frisky dog that has caught spring fever and bolted. It has a call-back system for easy use by those who might find the dog, built-in Auto-LED lights for night tracking, and a “Hear Now” two-way radio pet communication with a twelve-mile range for those owners who still feel they can talk some sense into the poor randy beast.
    There is also an elaborate glamour photo section showing various celebrities with their dogs: “Carmen Electra and Daisy shopping at Intuition in Hollywood.” “Mickey Rourke and Loki on location in London.” Hilary Duff, Serena Williams, Sandra Bullock, Uma Thurman, Sharon Osbourne, and Pink are all lovingly photographed with their main pets.
    New York Dog offers dog horoscopes—Taurus: “The dust settles and you have survived a domestic storm. You can come out from hiding”—as well as a pet psychologist’s advice column called “On the Couch,” which in older days was the last place in the world the dog was allowed. And where the psychologist comes up short, the “Psychic Companion” columnist steps in. Shown nothing but photographs of, for example, a hugely missed dead dog, the psychic is able to offer remarkable comfort: “I picked up that he was deeply connected to your spirit, and has been so for centuries.”
    When it comes to advertisements, New York Dog is in a class by itself: edible gingerbread homes for dogs, temporary tattoos for dogs—“Dogs Rule! Cats Suck!”— and even pet jewellery for the owners, including a $1,200 14k gold bracelet with five charms specific to your pet.
    There are fashion pages featuring fully dressed animals wearing the same insouciant, world-weary look that supermodels affect. There are more shots of the famous with their dogs—Princess Grace, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Martha Stewart—and there is, most unexpected of all, page after page, complete with colour photographs, of obituaries sent in by bereaved families, the pet every bit as lovingly remembered as—perhaps more so than—grandma herself.
    Ol’ Yeller, one suspects, would pull the trigger himself if he were still around.

Dogs as Fashion Accessories

    It was not, I can assure you, an acid flashback. There it was, on channel seven, a dog that had not been seen since shortly after Jim Morrison took up permanent residence in Paris, since Pierre and Margaret were together and having Christmas babies, since it seemed the entire world, not just this particular dog breed, had long and silky hair.
    An Afghan.
    It was riding in the back seat of something called an Optra, a new Chevrolet that is being flogged as “sleek and stylish,” and the dog, presumably, had been placed in the commercial to demonstrate just that—as well as to make a corny joke about sunroofs and the tangled, windblown hair that some of us, long, long ago, once enjoyed.
    I sat there wondering where they found the dog. I have not seen an Afghan since, oh, around 1975, when the street we lived on in Toronto had five and they seemed as momentarily fashionable as leisure suits and quadraphonic sound. Where did they all go?
    Dogs were fashion accessories long before Paris Hilton went in search of a Chihuahua