(excerpted from a longer article)  | | Call of the wild: Former veterinary technician Suzanne Losh now runs Urban Fauna. a day care for dogs. | From the yelps and the whining to the toys on the floor, it's your typical day-care center. Except that all the children are dogs. Welcome to Urban Fauna--a new day-care facility in Old Town catering exclusively to canines. On any given weekday, about 20 "parents" -- mostly urban professionals -- pay between $16 and $20 to drop off their dogs here before they go to work. Like a conventional day care, Urban Fauna provides structured activities for its kids, including agility training, walks and snack time. Day-care workers even use music to help set: the dogs' mood -- ocean sounds during nap time, Gregorian chants at night. Five years ago, doggie day care did not exist in Portland. Today there are five such centers -- complete with entrance requirements and waiting lists. "There's a lot of people who have decided not to have children," says Suzanne Losh, a former veterinary technician who started Urban Fauna six months ago. "So their dogs become their children."  | | On a recent afternoon, her [Suzanne's] charges vogue for a WW photographer. | Sci-fi writers in back in the '50s used to imagine love affairs between humans and other species, but none of them ever predicted day care for dogs. Nor could any futurist have foreseen sports drinks for dogs, Prozac for dogs, Muzak for dogs, health food for dogs, homeopathy for dogs, hydrotherapy for dogs, aromatherapy for dogs, acupuncture for dogs, or all-natural organic shampoo for dogs -- with conditioner. Doggie reiki. Doggie root canals. Doggie hip replacement. Doggie health insurance. horoscopes. Doggie therapists. Doggie dermatologists. Doggie surgeons. Doggie orthopedic surgeons. In 1998, the amount of money Americans spent on dog food totaled $5.9 billion, equivalent to the gross domestic product of Mongolia. America's hottest new publication? The Bark, a sort of Atlantic Monthly for dog owners. Companies from Taco Bell to the Helmsley Hotel chain have adopted hounds as their mascots, while Judge Wapner, who once presided over The People's Court, now metes out justice on Judge Wapner's Animal Court. Perhaps the most outrageous example of our evolving attitudes toward dogs are "neuticles" -- rubber testicles, designed to look and feel like the real thing, which are inserted into Fido's scrotum after the Big Snip, ensuring that neither he nor his owner will endure any locker-room snickering. Dog has been man's (and woman's) best friend since before the dawn of recorded history, and people have always included dogs in their families. But in recent years, urban Americans -- especially Portlanders--have begun to take a certain kind of four-legged logic to its logical, if somewhat surreal, extreme. If Elvis sang "You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog" today, it would likely be taken as a compliment. It's as if two parallel universes, the human universe and the dog universe, are somehow converging: Dog owners are increasingly treating their dogs as they would their children. Dogs aren't just part of the family any more--in some cases they have become the family... | 
