While more students own a pooch than a pair of Sperry Top Siders, creating a commercial for the loyal pets may be taking puppy adoration to the extreme.

Purina Pet Food aired a commercial in Austria and Germany this year specially created to attract the ears of a dog and draw their color- blind eyes to the screen. The claim of Purina is that adding high-pitched sounds only dogs can hear through- out the commercial will get them to focus on the mes- sage, and with high-frequency sounds the canines will understand what they watched on television.

The idea of such an ad may be harmless, but once rationalized, it serves no other purpose than leading dogs into thinking they can actually have the dog food mentioned in the commer- cial. In reality, most own- ers would not go out and buy food just because their dog can understand the ad- vertisement. The only time this would be acceptable is if they happened to be a trained dog whisperer and could understand the des- perate need their dog has for this commercial food.

Call me crazy, but dogs do not care about the brand of food they eat. They are not going to throw their noses into the air just because they did not get what they saw in a squeaky commercial. As long
as the food tastes and smells good to them, dogs will defi- nitely chow down.

Purina’s intentions were pretty clever, but they forgot about who is actually paying for the food. It’s the humans – the loving dog owners – who have the money, most certainly not the dogs. People are not going to buy something just because their dog might have understood the message. Besides, the saying is supposed to be, “You own the dog, the dog doesn’t own you.”