Feature Article |
How Rover Took Over
By Michael Schaffer
“People care about how they look, and they’re looking to accessorize their pets, too,” says Meghan Dinneen, who works at Old City pet boutique BoneJour. “And they look for food that’s natural, no preservatives, no by-products. … They’re like, I shop at Whole Foods, and I want something just as good for my pets.” As the DIPPies live, so do their pets. Pass the gourmet doggie biscuits, sucker.
NOT THAT I JUDGE. Oh, no.
Murphy, a St. Bernard with big eyes and drooping jowls, had me by the short hairs from the moment we adopted him from a shelter in about the last rural place in all of New Jersey. On the drive up, my wife and I talked self-righteously about how we weren’t going to become like those people — the ones who shell out for the spa stints and agility training and homeopathic medicine for their animals, the ones who laugh it off when their puppies frighten actual kids away from the neighborhood playground, the ones who give up vacations and promotions and transfers in order to spare pooches with names like Baxter and Sonoma and Hamilton and Mordecai from having their lives disrupted. Not us.
But just as a dog’s genes lead him to romp and sniff and bark, mine apparently led me, inexorably, into DIPPiehood. Three years later, Murphy is a veritable four-legged community development corporation.
He has a professional walker and a standing playdate. He has visited a professional groomer and availed himself of Whiting, a professional trainer. He has boarded at two of the city’s most popular kennels — but only after undergoing half-day interviews that seemed weighted with college-entrance-type significance as they approached.
He is fed all-natural food from one boutique store in Old City, given treats made of desiccated bull penises from another closer to Rittenhouse, and dosed with nutritional supplements from the South Philadelphia PetSmart. He sups on snacks from Metropolitan Bakery, has lapped water alfresco from a bowl at Rittenhouse Square’s Rouge, and is welcomed like a captain of industry into Commerce Bank. Indeed, when Commerce had trouble with the suppliers who furnish the roughly two million doggie biscuits it gives out every year, no less a figure than the bank’s chairman, Vernon Hill — you may recognize him as the guy who leads his own dog, Sir Duffield, through the Dog Carnivale he sponsors in Rittenhouse Square each September — personally got involved to sort things out. The new treats, he told the Inquirer, are “all natural and small, so the little ones can eat them, too.”
Murphy has been dressed as an Arab sheik for Halloween.
He has waited in a long line of pets in a South Philadelphia PetSmart to have his picture taken with Santa.
And did I mention he’s on antidepressants? It turned out those plaintive barks he emitted from the minute we left the house in the morning to the time we returned at night — the yelps that had the folks on the other side of the rowhouse wall threatening grave consequences if Murphy didn’t clam up — were diagnosed as separation anxiety. The medication, Clomicalm, is an antidepressant made by Novartis, one that’s also consumed by humans as Anafranil.
Back home, my in-laws laugh: Is your dog still on Prozac? But around here, when we forget to refill Murphy’s prescription, we can always pop over to our neighbors’ for a couple days’ worth to get us by. Who wants to be the last dog on the block to get your own happy pills?
NOT THAT I JUDGE. Oh, no.
Murphy, a St. Bernard with big eyes and drooping jowls, had me by the short hairs from the moment we adopted him from a shelter in about the last rural place in all of New Jersey. On the drive up, my wife and I talked self-righteously about how we weren’t going to become like those people — the ones who shell out for the spa stints and agility training and homeopathic medicine for their animals, the ones who laugh it off when their puppies frighten actual kids away from the neighborhood playground, the ones who give up vacations and promotions and transfers in order to spare pooches with names like Baxter and Sonoma and Hamilton and Mordecai from having their lives disrupted. Not us.
But just as a dog’s genes lead him to romp and sniff and bark, mine apparently led me, inexorably, into DIPPiehood. Three years later, Murphy is a veritable four-legged community development corporation.
He has a professional walker and a standing playdate. He has visited a professional groomer and availed himself of Whiting, a professional trainer. He has boarded at two of the city’s most popular kennels — but only after undergoing half-day interviews that seemed weighted with college-entrance-type significance as they approached.
He is fed all-natural food from one boutique store in Old City, given treats made of desiccated bull penises from another closer to Rittenhouse, and dosed with nutritional supplements from the South Philadelphia PetSmart. He sups on snacks from Metropolitan Bakery, has lapped water alfresco from a bowl at Rittenhouse Square’s Rouge, and is welcomed like a captain of industry into Commerce Bank. Indeed, when Commerce had trouble with the suppliers who furnish the roughly two million doggie biscuits it gives out every year, no less a figure than the bank’s chairman, Vernon Hill — you may recognize him as the guy who leads his own dog, Sir Duffield, through the Dog Carnivale he sponsors in Rittenhouse Square each September — personally got involved to sort things out. The new treats, he told the Inquirer, are “all natural and small, so the little ones can eat them, too.”
Murphy has been dressed as an Arab sheik for Halloween.
He has waited in a long line of pets in a South Philadelphia PetSmart to have his picture taken with Santa.
And did I mention he’s on antidepressants? It turned out those plaintive barks he emitted from the minute we left the house in the morning to the time we returned at night — the yelps that had the folks on the other side of the rowhouse wall threatening grave consequences if Murphy didn’t clam up — were diagnosed as separation anxiety. The medication, Clomicalm, is an antidepressant made by Novartis, one that’s also consumed by humans as Anafranil.
Back home, my in-laws laugh: Is your dog still on Prozac? But around here, when we forget to refill Murphy’s prescription, we can always pop over to our neighbors’ for a couple days’ worth to get us by. Who wants to be the last dog on the block to get your own happy pills?
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