#88 Pet Supplies

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If I’m the master of my household pets, why was I the one standing in line at the pet supply superstore shepherding two carts through the check-out line? The answer is simple; I’m a pawn of the pet-tech-industrial complex.

In case you missed it, pet supplies have become big business in this country. The mom-and-pop pet shop of yesteryear is gone, crushed under the weight of warehouse-sized megastores which, if they weren’t full of pet supplies, could be used to store a spare fleet of 747s, the Astrodome, or one month’s worth of redundant and contradictory government memos.

These stores require this much space because they must contain the thousands of mutant varieties of pet food available now. This is food which has been carefully produced in controlled laboratory conditions to appeal to even the most finicky pet owner.

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NOTES:

• As far as I can tell, the good folks at Purina don’t actually make Baby Chow. However, I was surprised to find out they do make pet-oriented podcasts. Check them out at this link:
  http://tinyurl.com/2yhdax
• Sadly Sony’s Aibo is no longer available. You can read about this valiant attempt at robo-pet at:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO
• If you like fish, but don’t want to maintain an aquarium of your own, follow the link to the Wakiki Aquarium. It’s a cool website that even has some webcams!
  http://www.waquarium.org/

Tags: humor essay | funny story | pets | cat | dog | hamster | comedy