Pets Really Can Be Like Human Family

For the 10 years they were together, Kristen de Marco and her terrier Gracie were inseparable. De Marco brought her dog to work each day, and routinely left dinners and parties early to rush home to her; she skipped her 20th high-school reunion because Gracie was sick and none of the available hotels could accommodate a dog. De Marco’s dedication sometimes struck friends, family, and colleagues as odd. When they heard that de Marco would pay to bring Gracie on every single plane ride she took, “people were like, It’s just a dog, put her in the boarding facility,” de Marco told me. “But she was so attached to me, and I to her.” To her, Gracie was family—“my first child.”

De Marco’s feelings about Gracie put her on one side of a split in the American mind. In many ways, people have never been more openly obsessed with their pets. Companion animals now get their own home-cooked foods, their own strollers, their own memory-foam mattresses (if they don’t prefer ours); they have their own clothing lines, wellness centers, and . They are trained to use toilets and driven to day cares; they feature in weddings and are written into wills. When they fall sick, they’re offered acupuncture, surgeries, chemotherapy, even. In 2022, Americans shelled out some $136.8 billion for pet care. A recent found that almost every pet-owning American—all 200 million of them—describes their animals as family, and more than half of pet owners say their pet is “as much a part of their family as a human member.”