O.C.’s pet expo is the bee’s knees
A skateboarding pig, a basketball-playing bird and an albino snake are among the stars of a weekend pet expo that slithered into the Orange County Fairgrounds on Friday.
About 70,000 humans are expected to attend the three-day event, which is billed as the world’s largest showcase of pets and pet products.
The 18th annual America’s Family Pet Expo kicked off its latest celebration of fur, feathers and scales with an exotic lineup of demonstrations and doodads, including beauty makeovers for dogs, earthquake preparedness for cats and lime-scented water deodorizers for hermit crabs.
Many of the exhibits play into the nation’s growing obsession with humanizing pets -- or animalizing humans.
One booth handed out samples of a new canned dog food that can also be eaten by people. Actor Dick Van Patten’s Natural Balance Eatables come in such flavors as Chinese take-out, hobo chili and spaghetti with beef in tomato sauce.
Another company, South Bark, sold blueberry facials for cats and canines, made with “an optical brightener to bring out the color of your pet’s fur,” according to spokeshuman Donna Walker.
Diamonds 4 Dogs offered matching bling for pets and owners, at $30 to $40 a pop.
And Canine CardioCare peddled a blood test to detect heart disease. The celebrity critter behind CardioCare is a harlequin Great Dane named Gibson, the Guinness World Record holder for tallest living dog. Gibson, who at 7 feet 4 on his hind legs could easily peer over Shaquille O’Neal, flew first class into John Wayne Airport for the pet expo.
Other products on display for anthropomorphized pets included:
* Designer T-shirts for dogs, emblazoned with such slogans as “Fleas Navidad,” “Bitch Magnet” and “I’m not fat ... just Fluffy.”
* “Dog Sitter II,” a DVD for pooches featuring eight levels of sound that humans can’t detect.
* Christmas CDs with such songs as “We Three Dogs Escape the Backyard” (sung to the tune of “We Three Kings of Orient Are”) and “Away in a Shelter.”
* Surprise a Pet, the nation’s first gift club for cats and dogs. Subscribers receive periodic packages of boutique toys, grooming products and treats, such as Pawbreakers, a catnip jawbreaker.
Pet pampering has become a huge field, said Surprise a Pet founder Cindy Pederson, whose previous job involved performing diagnostic ultrasounds on monkeys at the San Diego Zoo.
A few booths away from Pederson, a squad of award-winning groomers conducted beauty makeovers on abandoned and abused dogs. The pooches received manicures, baths and blow-dried fur styling, then strutted down a runway costumed as cowboys, ladybugs or hot dogs in a bun, hoping to be adopted by an audience member.
Promoting pet ownership is a key goal of the expo. One of the largest exhibits is the animal-adoption pavilion, filled with homeless bunnies, dogs and felines.
Elsewhere on the premises, two-footed visitors can ogle all sorts of species, from blue-tongue skinks to emperor scorpions.
They can pose for photos with a pig-eating python, pet a llama and join the Hairless Dog Club of America or the Opossum Society of the United States.
For the politically minded, there’s the Ferret Freedom booth, not to be confused with the legalizeferrets.orgdisplay.
Visitors can also wander into an animal kissing booth or attend seminars covering such topics as “What are cats thinking” and “Living with a handicapped bird.”
The expo is one of two sponsored each year by the World Wide Pet Industry Assn. The second is in Novi, Mich.
Information: www.PetExpoOC.comor (714) 549-1318.
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