BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Venus gazes in bewilderment on the candles flickering on her mini birthday cake. The partygoers crowd round her in expectant silence, however she doesn’t blow them out.
Canines can’t blow candles, in spite of everything. So Venus’ proprietor intervened, drawing a breath and extinguishing the flames to a spherical of applause earlier than serving her black mixed-breed a chew of meat-flavored birthday cake.
“Venus is like my daughter,” gushes Victoria Font, founding father of Barto Cafe, a bakery making truffles for canines simply south of Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires.
About twenty years in the past, a party for pampered pets that includes a customized cake for canine might have struck Argentines as weird.
Petrona licks her lips in entrance of her meat-flavored cake throughout her third birthday celebration at a park in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday, April 13, 2025. (AP Picture/Natacha Pisarenko)
However today Buenos Aires makes headlines for having among the many most pet house owners per capita on the planet. Public opinion surveys report pets in nearly 80% of town’s properties. That’s about 20% greater than the typical metropolis in the USA, in response to a current survey by the Pew Analysis Middle, and leaps and bounds forward of different international locations within the area.
As a rising variety of Argentines decide to be childless in a rustic infamous for its financial instability, canine have turn into the go-to companion.
Buenos Aires is now dwelling to over 493,600 canine — in comparison with 460,600 kids underneath the age of 14 — authorities statistics present.
These interviewed referred to themselves not as “house owners” however as “dad and mom.”
“Sandro is my savior, he’s my pleasure,” Magalí Maisonnave, a 34-year-old stylist, mentioned of her dachshund.
Within the soccer-crazed nation, Maisonnave usually clothes Sandro up within the jersey of her favourite staff, River Plate, and takes him to native video games.
“I’m his mama,” she mentioned.
Magalí Maisonnave poses for a photograph together with her six-year-old dachshund Sandro, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday, April 6, 2025. (AP Picture/Natacha Pisarenko)
‘You must give them the perfect’
Argentina’s rising ardour for canine has coincided with falling human fertility. In 2023, Argentina’s beginning fee was 6.5% decrease than the earlier yr and 41% decrease than it was a decade in the past. Kindergartens report struggling to fill school rooms.
Now not capable of afford greater purchases amid a succession of financial crises, Argentina’s center and higher lessons are splurging on their pets. With unemployment rising, public sector wages falling and the financial system simply rising from a recession underneath Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei, pups have turn into valuable family members.
“It’s more durable to entry loans or personal a house; there’s now not a set strategy to kind a household,” mentioned Dr. Marcos Díaz Videla, a psychologist specialised in human-canine relationships. “Animals have gotten a part of the household. With people, they’re shaping the dynamics, rituals and routines inside the house.”
The tendency for pet house owners to deal with their canine like children is altering the cityscape as pet accommodations, boutiques, cafes and even cemeteries spring up in Buenos Aires to money in on the craze.
Carolina Morales holds her four-month-old son Benjamin as her husband Alejandro Tirachini holds the household pet Thay, whom they take into account their first son, whereas they pose for a photograph backdropped by a portray of Thay by artist Lisandro Guma, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Picture/Natacha Pisarenko)
Pet magnificence salons now pull out all of the stops, offering not solely baths and trims however pedicures and poolside spas. The Guau Expertise parlor, for example, fees as much as $120 — roughly 1 / 4 of the typical Argentine month-to-month wage — for laundry, cleansing, shining, conditioning, trimming and perfuming.
“They’re dwelling beings who don’t keep round lengthy. Throughout that point, you need to give them the perfect,” mentioned Nicole Verdier, proprietor of Argentina’s first-ever canine bakery, Chumbis, which makes cookies, truffles, croissants, burgers and canapés from connoisseur meat, rooster and pork.
This humanizing of canine has even impressed a brand new noun — “perrhijo” — a fusion of the Spanish phrase for “canine” and “youngster.”
Canine mania takes Buenos Aires
In Buenos Aires, the place leash-pullers outnumber stroller-pushers in lots of neighborhoods, lawmakers have proposed a spread of pet-friendly initiatives, together with payments to ease entry for pets to public transport.
“The town has come a good distance, however I consider it now has the duty to take an even bigger leap,” mentioned native lawmaker Emmanuel Ferrario. His centrist “Vamos por más” (Let’s go for extra) occasion has offered 5 such payments now being debated in town legislature. One seeks to create a registry of canine walkers who should cross an examination each two years and endure CPR and animal habits coaching.
Co-owner Rocio Dominguez presents a deal with to Tony, one among her regulars, at Chumbis, an artisanal bakery for animals, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Picture/Natacha Pisarenko)
“I see a possibility for it to turn into essentially the most pet-friendly metropolis within the area,” Ferrario mentioned.
Different politicians fret concerning the proliferation of pet-keeping as a symptom of an even bigger disaster. They ask why younger folks in Argentina select elevating pets over elevating kids because the nation ages quickly.
“The rankings (of pet possession) are unsettling. … Buenos Aires has so many canine and so few kids,” mentioned Clara Muzzio, town’s conservative deputy mayor. “A world with fewer kids is a worse world.”
A presidential pet lover
Maybe Argentina’s most outstanding canine fanatic is its right-wing President Javier Milei, who moved into the federal government home in December 2023 with 4 English mastiffs that he calls his “four-legged kids.”
A brash TV character elected to rescue Argentina from its spiraling financial disaster, Milei named Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas after the three libertarian American economists he most admires — Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas. The canine are genetic clones of Milei’s former canine, Conan, who died in 2017.
Milei nonetheless refers to Conan within the current tense, resulting in intense hypothesis concerning the variety of canine he owns. Since assuming workplace, his canine have remained out of sight. A authorities decision prohibiting officers from disclosing data to the general public about Milei’s mastiffs has accomplished little to tamp down on the controversy.
Macetas con plantas y un bol de perro junto a la tumba de Milo en el cementerio para mascotas de Jardines del Almas, ubicado dentro de un refugio de animales a las afueras de Buenos Aires, Argentina, el martes 6 de mayo de 2025. (AP Foto/Natacha Pisarenko)
Pet cemeteries
For heartbroken house owners with out the monetary means to genetically duplicate their lifeless canine, Argentine morticians put together burials and cremations.
Demand has surged at Gardens of the Soul, a pet cemetery inside an animal shelter close to Buenos Aires, the place house owners maintain emotional rituals to bid their companions farewell and often go to their graves.
There are some 300 tombstones painted with traditional Argentine canine names, like Negro and Coco, and strewn with pictures, handwritten notes and flowers.
“Earlier than, two months might go by with out anybody being buried. Now, it’s not less than a few times per week,” mentioned shelter supervisor Alicia Barreto, who nonetheless mourns her first rescue, a pup she discovered alive in a bag of canine carcasses thrown on the roadside in 2000.
That grisly picture haunts her, she mentioned. However she takes consolation in figuring out that, when the time got here 10 years later, she gave her “perrhijo,” Mariano, a dignified burial.
“I instructed myself I’d discover him once more,” she mentioned at his marble tombstone. “In the mean time of my loss of life, or afterward, I’ll be reunited with him.”