Bling-bling for dogs

Bling-bling for dogs - www.theage.com.au: "By Catherine Milner and Victoria Gurvich"

This article is from 2003, but I was just reading a French one where it was saying Americans currently spend 54 billion on their cats and dogs. In this article Australians spend 100 million a year on dog accessories. Britain spends 5.2 billion pounds on pets care. France has started to favour cats and their numbers have gone up 5% to 9 million. We have had a change from larger dogs to smaller dogs and cat owners are starting to feel the pinch because there is quite a strong anti cat movement here. A number of people see them as pests and as wild life killers. We also have problems with feral cats. (Tell me about it!!)Cat runs are becoming the popular alternative, but people are not very accepting of cats these days. They forget they have put wild life in a state of danger and distress because they have cleared native vegetation for their new housing estates. That aside , that is a huge amount of money on pets! No wonder we all gave so freely to the tsunami victims. We must have felt bad our animals had better living conditions and amenities than the human populations in some areas of those affected countries. Sad really. I think we can do better than that as a world and I know we are trying to make a difference now. In this day and age no one has to go hungry and be sick. We have too much transport, too much wealth and too much need to help each other.