“I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.”

August Strindberg

A man’s best friend? Certainly not mine. Yet after living in New York for more than a year now I’m left with the feeling that the friendship is being forced upon me. Come wind, rain, or snow, whichever street or park trail I take in the city, almost without fail I cross paths with a dog and its owner trotting behind on the other end of the leash.

After an initial dance to avoid the dog’s embrace, and after recovering my cool, my mind invariably longs for the time when animals were treated as, well, animals. Those golden days were long before I was born, but I believe the history books aren’t lying when they tell of an age when dogs lived in kennels and rabbits were found in the field.

It’s probably because this city is lonelier than others, but what is striking about New York is the way dogs are treated as family members. The only difference is that they have no school to attend, no bread to win, and no chores to do. Their days consist of being walked, fed, and cuddled. A Hindu reincarnation as a dog doesn’t sound quite so bad now does it? This city’s pet owners are hard to fathom. On Park Avenue I see people who send their children off to boarding school and who wouldn’t know a spatula from a sieve in the kitchen stoop down to pick up their dog’s droppings.

The New York pet obsession verges on the absurd. Pets now have designer clothes, dermatologists, and luxury hotels. Fawning over cocker spaniel isn’t just the preserve of the moneyed elites, however.

Perhaps its wrong of me to fix on New York. Pet spending has doubled nationwide in the last decade. But in New York, because of the lack of space — and especially the lack of alleys! — the tension is especially great. In the five boroughs, the single pedestrian has to also battle the other two types of locals found vying for control of the city’s streets: Car people and kid people. The poor pedestrian has to dodge cars turning illegally on red lights and parking on the sidewalk. He must run the obstacle course of self-righteous matrons and their children standing idly on, or walking slowly along, the sidewalk. Add a Chow yapping and you get the picture.

I’m from Britain, I daydream from time to time about where all this started. It was the British Victorians who really turned animals into pets. As a sign of affluence (or as a sign of their affluence) they moved from just keeping animals for utilitarian purposes — hunting, guarding, herding, and so on — to keeping them for pleasure as well. Queen Victoria and her love of dogs probably set the national trend. Is it just a coincidence that the decline of the British Empire — during Queen Victoria’s reign it was said that “the sun never set on the British Empire” — coincided with the rise of animals as pets?

Meanwhile, I continue to try to get along in New York. But it is hard. So what that Albert chewed through another rug, isn’t he cute? Umm, no. Cute is a word reserved for babies. So what that Frank let nature call on the kitchen floor, isn’t he so loving? Not really. Is your personal life so bad that this is where you need to turn to for love?

With friends I write off their pet obsession as one of their quirks. My real problem is with strangers who seem not to mind when their pets accost me. It is an unattractive form of self-deception to tell someone else of your Rhodesian Ridgeback that “he is not dangerous.” Nature designed his looks to send a signal that he is. The owners either ignore their pet’s sniffing my leg as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to have an animal get intimate with a person’s leg outside of a zoo, or they give a helpless shrug and smile as if saying “what can I do?” Expecting me to smile back, say “koochie koochie,” and pinch the dog’s cheeks as if it is a newborn baby.

I don’t. I growl back.

Mr. Freedman is editor of the online edition of The New York Sun and blogs at www.itshinesforall.com.