The other day, as I was driving back from a meeting, I saw a sign on a pet shop: Weight control food for your cat or dog.
What? We have overweight pets, too? Not content to stuff ourselves, are we now stuffing our animals, too? Please, tell me this is just a marketing gimmick...
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Diet dog food is nothing new. I've been seeing that since the 80's. The difference in what you were seeing is that it contains an additive dietary supplement specifically designed for dogs, in the same vein that drugs like Phenoline were designed for weight control in humans.
Porky pooches have been around for some time now.
Of course we have overweight dogs. We've had a food surplus for most of our history as a nation. Most Americans throw food away on a daily basis. In some households, dogs can get fat just eating the scraps from the table. And yes, many people are sufficiently out of touch with the consequences of their actions that they will feed the dog too many table scraps and then buy diet dog food.
What caught me by surprise was when I found out that we also have joint replacement surgery for dogs and cats, cataract surgery for dogs and cats, and so on and so forth. No wonder we spend so much on medical care, if we view it as so essential to life that we're willing to pay for surgery for our pets, even for conditions that aren't life-threatening!
I really think this says a lot about our culture. Yes, it says something about how we value pets, but, I think more interestingly, I think it says something about how we view circumstances. We want everything to always be perfect and convenient. We don't want to ever have to suffer any pain or do anything hard. If we have so much as a stomach ache we want medication to fix it right away.
In some ways I'm impressed with the progress that the medical community has made in the last hundred years or so. The fact that we can effectively treat things like heart attacks and cancer says something about how hard people have worked to accomplish great (and difficult) things, and that's very commendable.
But in other ways I worry that the way we look at medicine is a terrible symptom of a cultural disease wherein we want to guarantee ourselves a flawless existence. That approach to life is entirely futile.
I guess it all comes down to attitude. When you see people screaming that the government *owes* everyone medical care, you see the ugly side of our culture.
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