It is Charlie's birthday next weekend and he will be having all his playmates to a party in the park. The food will be special – probably raw veal roulade.
There will be birthday presents, of course, and they could be anything from designer jackets to feathered French day beds and rhinestone chokers.
Charlie will be taken to the salon to be washed and groomed for the day with teeth cleaned and nails clipped – and painted!
Charlie, a dog, is part of a trend in Australia described by social commentator Bernard Salt as "the rise of the fur family".
Mr Salt, a social forecaster for KPMG consultants, says research indicates that fewer Australians are choosing the traditional family unit as a way of life, with the trend tending towards solo residency. Many of these singles are opting for pets as companions.
"Less than 28 per cent of households are now Mum, Dad and the kids, whereas by the end of the decade, you'll find that 29 per cent of households are single person households," Mr Salt told the ABC. "Now the issue with single person households is that people are looking for companionship and as a consequence, people living singly will include, increasingly, pets as their companions.
"So you could see in Australia, in the next decade, where the fur family, the pet family, actually becomes the dominant social institution in Australia rather than the human family."
Certainly, the pet industry is booming. Australians spent over $4 billion dollars on their pets in 2005, up 50 per cent from five years before, says PetNet, the website of the Australian Petcare Information and Advisory Service.
Around two-thirds of the 7.5 million households in Australia own a pet of some sort and Australia now has among the highest incidence of pet ownership in the world.
The most common pets are the dog, cat, bird, horse and fish, but it is not uncommon to find a couple of ferrets housed out the back or to see a person wandering around the supermarket with a dragon lizard propped alertly on the shoulder.
And it is not only the singles population who are embracing pet ownership. Social change is evident on many fronts with more couples either delaying a family or choosing not to have children at all; gay and lesbian couples setting up house and choosing a pet to share; or elderly couples filling the gap left by grown-up children.
The result is an increasing willingness to treat pets with the same interest as we would any other member of the family.
Cam McTavish, owner of Queensland-based Aristopet, which is the largest maker of pet-care products in Australia, says the humanising of pets is definitely escalating. "Over 35 years, I've seen a continuous change in the relationship that the owner has with their pet," he told The Bulletin. "People enjoy foisting attention on their pets. They get pleasure from what they believe to be indulging them."
While one income is enough to support a pet and anyone with a dog or cat, a horse or even fish would know that pets are not cheap, two income pet families can afford to be extravagant in indulging their pets – and they are.
The pet industry has expanded into areas that would be beyond comprehensions for the former Aussie generation. "Virtually anything that humans do is a growth area in pets," says Mr McTavish.
Luxury items available for pets include fur-lined jackets, battery operated toys and self-warming mats, doggy, cat and bird nail polish, designer bird cages. In Sydney, there is already a café in a leash-free dog park that caters specifically to dogs. Café Bones sells a range of doggy snacks along with its signature drink, the puppacinno.
"Men and women living singly longer need some form of companionship," says Bernard Salt. "You need to have someone in the apartment when you come home late at night and there is the argument of course, that pets – dogs in particular – make better and more faithful companions than some humans in fact. So there is a real market."
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