Fido dress-up can be tricky
On Saturday, scores of otherwise ordinary people will descend on Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, with their dogs in tow, for the annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade.
The event, sponsored by Purina Beggin’, (the makers of the popular canine treat “Purina Beggin’ Strips Bacon”) is, according to CNN, the “largest dog costume parade” in the entire world. (And here I assumed it was the only one. Silly me.)
What, you may ask, happens at the “largest dog costume parade in the world?” If you answered that dogs wear costumes, you’d only be half right. In fact, dogs and dog owners dress up in costume at the T.S.H.D.P, usually together, as a theme.
The winners of last year’s event, to illustrate, were a man and a woman who staged a chilling Day of the Dead tableau with their chihuahuas.
If I had judged the parade, I would have given first prize to my favourite contestant: a bulldog in blond wig and pearls, i.e., Marilyn Monroe.
As for the bewigged lapdog dressed up as Caitlyn Jenner in a sultry white number eerily similar to the frock the real-life Jenner donned on the cover of Vanity Fair, I have no words. This may be because the dog’s owner, meanwhile, wore a “USA” tracksuit and imitation gold medal. (Presumably, he was channelling the ghost of the pre-Caitlyn Jenner, Bruce.)
All this is to say, with a universal eye roll, that people love their dogs (and possibly their pets in general) a lot. So much so, it turns out, that in exhibiting their love for their dogs, they tend to sacrifice their dignity in the process and as some of the scenarios above suggest, the dignity of their animals, too.
Until recently, I would have considered this sacrifice of dignity to be all in good fun. Notwithstanding the questionable Caitlyn Jenner lapdog getup, the whole Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade would have registered as a perfect example of a dignity-defying, weirdly healthy good time. Even the matchy-matchiness of the whole dog-owner pairings would have given me a good laugh, not unlike the laugh so many people got when Fido the phone company ran their now worldfamous ad campaign in the late 1990s featuring dogs and owners who happened to look exactly like each other.
But there’s a difference between the Fido ad animal/human likenesses and the Halloween dog parade likenesses: the first were happy accidents; the latter are calculated constructs. The former were coincidental; the latter are intentional. And the culprits behind the intent are us, the human half of the pair, the animal-owners. I say “us” advisedly. I am about to realize a lifelong ambition and become a dog-owner myself. And my impending ownerhood — a kind of parenthood — has me thinking that seeing our pets as extensions of ourselves may not be such a terrific idea after all.
The negative effects of this particular brand of anthropomorphism (“ascribing human qualities to animals”) are already there if you look for them.
In an article last month titled “Is Your Dog’s Halloween Costume Sexist?” the Washington Post noted, tongue-in-cheek, that while retailers had finally started to abandon gender bias in Halloween costumes for young human girls, pet outlets like Petsmart or Baxterboo.com are still apparently gender-rigid in their Halloween togs, hyping certain costumes for male dogs (firefighter and police officer) and others for females (sweetheart nurse or French maid).
That this was a ludicrous thing to be outraged by (something the right-wing site Breitbart pointed out, not getting the tongue-in-cheek part) was obvious, but it hid a kernel of truth: It’s easy to overlook the indignity of dressing up your Scottish terrier as an extension of yourself for Halloween, but when we start extending our gender bias to pets, too, it starts feeling kind of creepy. Really, French maid dogs?
Other effects of human-to-dog extension are more substantially questionable.
Just this past week, CBC news reported that between 40 and 50 per cent of all owned pets in Canada are overweight. The percentage of Canadian people over the age of 18 who are overweight? Between 40 and 50 per cent. Not only does Rover’s face resemble ours these days, it seems; so does his spare tire.
And Australian cities have been experiencing a minor epidemic of abandoned pets in the recent past, at least partly the result of foreign students studying in Australia who neglect to take their dogs with them when they return home. These dogs aren’t feral, just homeless, but to be homeless, you have to initially be given a home to lose. And who gives pets homes? Us.
So, I hereby make a pledge: I will do everything in my power not to make my dog homeless. And I will do everything I cannot to make him obese.
But when it comes to Halloween, I make no promises. Tompkins Square Dog Parade, here I come. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.