All clips tagged cats

VIEWS FROM A VET  Enlarge Patty Khuly, a small-animal veterinarian in Miami, is author of FullyVetted, a blog on pet health at PetMD.com. She also writes weekly for the Miami Herald and monthly for Veterinary Practice News. Her USA TODAY guest column appears each Friday. Khuly lives in South Miami with her son, Max, dogs Vincent and Slumdog, goats Poppy and Tulip, and a backyard flock of chickens.  PAW PRINT POST ON TWITTER

Excessive, indulgent, inessential, hedonistic, frilly, sumptuous, extravagant.

Such are the adjectives the word "luxury" denotes. None of which, I'd argue, apply to my own conception of the animals I keep as pets. Nor is it likely to jibe with most pet lovers' take on pet-dom.

After all, some of us don't necessarily see animal-keeping as a personal choice. We view animals among us as the result of the millennia-old process of domestication — a complex, symbiotic relationship that serves as significant measure of our humanity.

Which is perhaps why so many of us feel almost compelled to live alongside them. This, despite the fact that in all our modernity, we've mostly "aged out" of keeping pets as ratters, hunters and defenders (among other survival-based uses). Because, as the argument goes, there's something so fundamentally coevolutionary (about dogs and cats in particular) that we continue to forge lasting bonds with them in spite of a less-pressing need to keep them close.

No, in my case, pets are decidedly not luxuries — not any more than anything else we might consider "essential" to our quality of life can be said to be a luxury. After all, we humans need no more than food, water, clothing and shelter to survive.

Yet I'm also convinced the same cannot be said for all pet owners (we all know who they are). Nor do I expect everyone to agree that pet-keeping can possibly be essential. Pets, they'll say, are nothing more than a self-indulgent drain on personal resources.

Though to rebut the naysayers, I might offer the case of the old woman whose only reason to get out of bed is to feed her cat. But I do understand the reasoning of those who wonder how far we as a society should go to shoulder the expenses not only of our human citizenry, but that of their animals as well.

Because if animals are deemed essential, non-luxury goods, our social services would surely expand to meet the demand for low-income pet care. Which is sort of where we're headed … for better or worse.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum within the animal crowd: They're the puritanical animal rightists, and they believe pets are the ultimate luxury; that keeping them enslaved to humans is no less morally egregious than wearing fur or killing wolves from helicopters for sport. Moreover, the fact that we can and do subjugate them to our will and call them essential to our personal psyches or our need to thrive is an affront to their own physical and psychological welfare.

High-volume arguments from both camps aside, it's clear the case is thick as mud. All of which only serves to make me ponder this gem all the more: If pets are a luxury, what does that say about my profession?