“You want a cake here, you send out for one – even if it’s for your pet.”
But if the success of the Three Dog Bakery is anything to go by, millions of Americans are more than willing to cook for their pets. Last year the Three Dog Bakery got its own weekly spot on the US cable channel The Food Network, a show which demonstrates cooking ideas for your dogs.One of a host of companies creating organic and additive-free food for pets, the Three Dog Bakery is run by ceaseless self-promoters Dan Dye and Mark Beckloff. They launched it in 1989: sick of their unfulfilling day jobs, they wanted to start working hard at something they loved. For Christmas of 1989, Mark’s Mom gave him a cookie-cutter in the shape of a bone as a stocking filler. Mark explains: “As I pulled it out of the stocking, it just clicked – we should start making dog cookies.”Since then, they’ve been featured on the covers of Forbes and Entrepreneur magazines, and have become a hugely popular example of the American dream come true. “We started out of our own kitchen, we had no money, we had no baking or business experience, but we had a true love for dogs.

We talked to vets to find out what to stay away from and what to add. Over several months we perfected our recipe for vegetable and beef biscuits.” This turned out to be their first biscuit on the road to becoming millionaires.Dan and Mark’s success lies in focussing on the most important element behind the feeding of any pet – the owner. Mark explains the ethos behind the food: “We wanted to create an all-natural treat. We wanted to use ingredients that people would feel comfortable about eating themselves.”And do they? “Oh, absolutely.

Mothers come in when their children are teething and buy biscuits for their kid to munch on for their gums.”If you don’t have the energy to follow one of their recipes, the food on offer in their stores includes premium blend complete food, biscuits in various sizes for different-sized pets, and doggy cakes. They also cater for special occasions, and even created a cake recently for a canine wedding.The ambition of these dog chefs is little short of world domination. Their third cookbook has just been published in the US, with plans to distribute it worldwide in 12 languages. The book includes “yappetizers”, cakes and special meals for birthdays, Halloween and Thanksgiving. Dan and Mark have eight bakeries in the States with plans for 20 more by the end of this year and 100 by the end of 1999. They hope to open a Three Dogs franchise in the UK next year and are more than interested to hear from people who’d like to set one up. So if you’d like to pack in the day job and spend the rest of your life as a caterer to the well-heeled doggy fraternity, give them a call.As frivolous as all this might seem, post-BSE Britain is far more aware of what is contained in our food and in that of our loved ones.

The deaths of cats attributed to CJD have made owners think closely about what they set down for Felix. Marketing pet food is a highly lucrative business – it is consistently among the top five products sold in supermarkets. As Beverley Cuddy of Dogs Today magazine notes: “Manufacturers used to advertise dog food simply on its taste appeal, but have shifted their emphasis dramatically towards health.”The theories of how best to feed one’s pets vary almost as wildly as theories about the human diet. It’s not just that these anonymous US-style shopping developments, once described by the retail designer Rodney Fitch as “alienating blots on the landscape”, can suck the life out of town centres, lead to job losses and cause environmental blight – although all this is certainly true. More than that, argue their critics, they all too easily devalue any local sense of place and the cultural traditions that define it.
All this explains why the planners have moved against monster out-of- town developments and why retail designers have started being much more sensitive to local heritage and architectural context, even to the point at which a certain cultural pastiche is permissible. Witness the initial success in the late Eighties of Prince’s Square shopping centre in Glasgow, with its cutesy Art Nouveau references to turn-of-the-century Mackintosh Scotland, in comparison with the reception granted to the nearby St Enoch Centre, an American “glass spaceship” mall dropped into the city.You’d have thought that mall developers would have learnt the lessons of US retail imperialism in Britain during the Nineties, when so much money has had to be spent on revamping these centres to make them more amenable to local communities and less like beacons of International Consumer Style, but no. What works in Texas or Arkansas doesn’t necessarily translate to a windy Wednesday morning in Watford.

And when the out-of-town mall, adapted from America’s freeway culture, ends up in the disused quarry pits and derelict land close to our own clogged motorway network, even more is lost in translation

That’s when the cry of cultural imperialism goes up. Bruce Fogal practises at the Portman Veterinary Clinic on 0171 723 2068. !PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT POWELL 1 COMPILED BY SUE WEBSTERCOMING SOON: MAIL-ORDER CAKES. OVER-financed, over-sized and over here, the white-box American shopping malls air-lifted across the Atlantic from Houston or Minneapolis and parachuted directly into the heart of British towns and cities haven’t always had a happy transition. It’s bad enough during daylight, when a dog will throw itself off a cliff to catch one; doing this at night just raises the probability of the animal landing somewhere awkward.” And some general advice: “Frisbees can be good toys but you must throw them low.