Why I Hate The New York Times, part 4,427

The rest of America thinks the best thing for your dog's self-esteem is meaningful work. Image via True American Dog.

Peter Haldeman in The New York Times ("The Secret Price of Pets") reports that you can now have your ex-male dog furnished with surgically implanted silicon nuts, known by the trademark "Neuticles", like Kim Kardashian's boxer and Larry Flynt's dobermans:

“Some people throw the dog in the car and have him turned into a eunuch because they don’t care,” [their inventor Gregg A.] Miller said recently. “But there’s a certain segment of pet owners that do care, and that’s where Neuticles come in. And it’s not only canines and felines. We’ve done an elephant, we’ve done prairie dogs. I Neuticled a monkey in Pocahontas, Ark., and a colony of rats for the University of Louisiana.”

But the majority of his clients, Mr. Miller said, are “everyday pet owners who opt for Neuticles so their pet will maintain its dignity and self-esteem.”

I think this is a mistake, as far as the self-esteem part goes. It's more important to your dog to smell like he has balls than to look like he has balls.

The whole article is not the worst Times Style article you've ever seen—it's pretty funny throughout, and covers all sorts of interesting developments, from plastic surgery (now going beyond tummy tucks and eyebrow lifts to gender reassignment, generally for what sound like legitimate medical reasons) to cannabis-based lip balm and psychopharmacology, and its celebrity names extend to Oprah Winfrey and Jon Stewart (whose French bulldog has received some motivational life coaching to help him on the path "from impulse-based behavior to the way of higher consciousness"), but honestly, this is not The Way We Live Now.

“Right now ‘Asian fusion’ is trending,” said Jorge Bendersky, a New York dog groomer, of a cut that was developed in Japan. Mr. Bendersky charges up to $300 an hour to style clients like Rita, Gisele Bündchen’s Yorkshire terrier, and Sophie, P. Diddy’s miniature Maltese. “That’s very short on the body and very long on the legs, like big bell bottoms, which gives them the opportunity to <b>wear a dress or a sweater and necklace without messing up the hairstyle</b>.”

The only positive outcome for me is a plausible new nickname for former Speaker of the House Newticles Gingrich, which I hope to start using in the near future.