I love dogs. I have two: a pug and a Jack Russell. They run my house like they pay the mortgage.
The pug snores like a dying lawn mower and produces gas that has, on numerous occasions, cleared a room of human beings. The Jack Russell stares at the mailman the way Manson stared at juries. They’re a handful, but they are mine. So please know that what follows comes from a co-conspirator, not a critic.
Pet humanization is one of the most reliable consumer trends of the past two decades: recession-resistant and demographically expanding.
Golden Child is the latest entrant in America’s premium pet food gold rush, a venture-backed, direct-to-consumer brand that thinks your dog should be treated like royalty. It pitches itself as a wellness system for canines, and that’s exactly what it is. There are recipes and drizzles. There is talk of amino acids and gut flora, the kind of language once reserved for humans recovering from something serious. There are five-star meal plans at $90 a month.
The dogs in question, meanwhile, eat their own vomit when no one is looking.
Dog’s life
The product is fine. The cultural moment producing it is the problem. Americans now spend roughly $158 billion a year on their pets (the combined GDP of Azerbaijan and Bolivia). A meaningful slice of that goes to food alone, and the premium tier keeps climbing while regular grocery budgets shrink. Households that order DoorDash four nights a week and that haven’t touched a vegetable since a wedding in 2022 are reading ingredient labels on dog food the way oncologists read blood panels. The Labrador eats grass-fed bison sourced from a single Montana ranch. The owner eats a frozen burrito over the sink.
A Pew survey found that 51% of dog owners consider their pet as much a part of the family as a human member. Estate lawyers, one assumes, have noticed. Wills are being rewritten. Somewhere, a daughter is being cut for a dachshund.
The figure climbs even higher among Millennials and Gen Zers, who are having fewer kids, getting married less, and writing personal essays in which their dogs appear as therapists, life partners, and the last remaining reason to get out of bed. For many, a labradoodle has assumed the role of romantic partner, co-parent, and emergency contact. There is a real and growing market of people who tell pollsters they would rather come home to a dog than a spouse.
RELATED: Modern pet ownership is a mental illness
Tommaso Boddi/GC Images/Getty Images
Petting zoo
To some, this looks like harmless eccentricity. It is, in fact, the visible surface of a deeper rearrangement. A generation of people are pouring into their pets the care and attention they cannot seem to direct at themselves or at one another. The dog gets the supplements. The dog gets the bone-broth topper. The dog gets the orthopedic bed engineered by a former Tesla designer. The owner, meanwhile, hasn’t seen a primary care doctor in four years and sleeps on a mattress purchased during the Obama administration.
Wellness, as a cultural product, has performed a strange migration. It started as a self-improvement promise, mutated into an aesthetic, and has now landed on the family pet, where it can be practiced without the burden of self-discipline.
Buying Golden Child is easier than cooking dinner. Researching your dog’s microbiome is more pleasant than confronting your own. The dog cannot push back, cannot disappoint you, cannot leave. Devotion flows in one direction and returns as tail wags. It is the most effortless emotional transaction available in modern American life.
To be clear, companies like Atomic (the venture studio behind Golden Child) aren’t villains. They’re simply responding rationally to a market that has decided dogs are the last acceptable recipients of unconditional generosity.
Pet humanization is one of the most reliable consumer trends of the past two decades: recession-resistant, demographically expanding, and immune to the kind of guilt that suppresses other luxury spending. A Birkin invites judgment. A supplement regimen for your dog’s joints invites applause.
Paw patrol
Zoom out, and the absurdity compounds. American life expectancy fell during the pandemic and has barely recovered. Roughly half of adults take a daily prescription medication. Anti-anxiety drug use among young adults has risen sharply in recent years. One-third of Americans now report what can only be described as an existential crisis. More and more are self-medicating — with alcohol, with drugs, with whatever is closest.
The same population producing these numbers is the population debating whether the schnauzer should be on a raw or gently cooked diet. The schnauzer, for the record, would devour a sock, cough it up, and devour it again.
Of course dogs deserve to be treated well. They should be cared for, fed properly, and protected. But people spending more on their pets than on themselves or the people around them ought to pause and reconsider.
Loving animals well is a real and decent thing, and dogs deserve a great deal of what they receive. The discomfort lies elsewhere. Somewhere along the way, caring for a dog became a substitute for the far less photogenic work of caring for ourselves and each other.
Dogs, Wellness, Pets, Culture, Golden child, Premium dog food, Lifestyle
