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Every day, after deciding what to wear, Courtney Small picks out a little pink outfit for her baby, Gucci. Although Gucci Baby is only six months old, she already has one outfit for every week of her life. Ms. Small then puts Gucci in a sling, colour co-ordinated to her own clothing, and goes to work with her, showing houses in Kingston.

"She fills the role of child and then some ... I just love her to death," gushes Ms. Small of her Chihuahua puppy. Sometimes Ms. Small paints Gucci's nails; in the summer the dog tans on her own deck chair in one of her many bikinis.

Gucci's duds are small potatoes compared to some of the clothes that were trotted down the runway in August during Pet Fashion Week in New York. There were hip-hop dogs, tweed dogs, and dogs in massive explosions of plumage and glitter. Looking at the photos, I felt a twinge of what was - inexplicably - like moral outrage.

A lot of people get that way about pets in fancy clothes. Or pets being otherwise babied - and believe me, there is no shortage of ways to go about it. Our tendency to "humanize" our pets is the main reason the pet industry is currently touted as one of the top growth industries.

No niche has gone unexploited. This year, PetSmart opened a new chain of pet hotels - with televisions in the rooms. You can buy your pet bodybuilding formula for a beefier bod, or obesity meds to slim down. Pet insurance helps with hefty vet bills. You can dress your pet in diamonds, cashmere or a bridal gown. Dog "spaws" offer "pawdicures." And then there are the mesmerizingly awful gold fronts you can buy at Pitgrillz.com, for dogs whose gangsta quotient is woefully low.

I can't decide if this points to a new, more evolved point in our treatment of animals, or if it's insane and deeply narcissistic. Maybe it's all of the above.

Patricia McConnell, an animal behaviorist and professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that "much that informs our relationships with dogs right now is an emotional connection," which is "not to be demeaned...

"We have all these hard-wired responses to their happy faces and to their dependence upon us, and at the same time we feel this unconditional love from them." In industrialized societies, she notes, we've lost a connection to nature, which is "profoundly disruptive." In short, she says, it's lonely being human, and dogs help us fill that existential void.

This is certainly true for Ms. Small, who describes Gucci as "filling that void of happiness that I had felt prior to getting her." Ms. Small clearly gives back to her dog, although some would question whether buying Gucci a deck chair was the best way to go about it.

Kathryn Denning, an assistant professor of anthropology at York University in Toronto, reflects: "It's wonderful that people are trying to extend their care ... but at the same time, you do have to look at it and say, 'Well, isn't that obscene, that some people can afford to put their dog in a doggie hotel with a television set in it, while there are people sleeping under bridges?' " (Although, as Dr. McConnell points out, people spend the same kind of money on things such as golf or clothing, and it's rarely questioned.)

But the concerns are not simply material ones. Anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas of Peterborough, N.H., author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, feels that what is lost by humanizing our pets is nothing less than a whole culture. "[Owners] project onto the dog their own wishes," she says, and in doing so, "they deprive themselves of understanding who their animals are. Their animals are very real beings with lots of thoughts, plans, memories, all kinds of things. And if we allow ourselves to see them in that light, we get a much more clear picture of who they are."

However, she concedes, dogs are very adaptable. "The little tiny ones make very good babies."

Writer and editor Lisan Jutras has two cats, a Puerto Rican street dog and many garments covered in pet hair.