For years an adage in advertising has been to get pets in there.  People will buy pets and babies.   It seems that TV programmers may be picking up on this.  Pets have played a small role in sit-coms before, but there haven’t been many pet-themed shows on “mainstream TV.”  Wednesday night at 8pm on CBS you can see “Dogs in the City,”

where dog trainer Justin Silver trains dogs and their owners.  I haven’t watched the “Dog Whisperer” or anything Victoria Stillwell has done, so I can’t say if this is similar or not.  I enjoyed “Dogs in the City.”  I haven’t discussed any of the particulars with any of the trainers I know, but I liked his main premise: The dogs pick things up pretty quickly.  It’s the people that take the time to train. 

    I learned from the first 2 minutes of the training class I took with my lab that I needed the class as much or more than the dog did.  Silver shows the pet owners how to manage their pets.  You will think you know people that are in the show by the way they act with their dogs.  They are in denial as far as their aggression or other behaviors and he gets the owners to change their ways.  There are a lot of neat shots of dogs taken around the city as well.  I think most dog owners would enjoy this. 

    NBC is not being left out of the pet themed shows.  This fall they will debut “Animal Practice” starring Justin Kirk as a vet in New York City that deals with animals better than people.  His ex takes over ownership of his practice and doesn’t like animals.  It sounds to me like it won’t make it to Christmas, but you can get a sneak peak for yourself.   Right now this show is on the schedule for 8pm on Wednesdays.  We’ll see which dog show survives and one thing we know about TV shows is that is something works, it will get copied.  So if one or both of these shows work, look for more pet shows on the air in the future.  You Tube is full of singing and dancing animals…

     Fetch! Pet Care of NW Atlanta provides dog walking and pet sitting services as well as providing cat care in Roswell, East Cobb, Marietta and Woodstock.