When I saw the NYT headline this weekend that read “Whispering to Rottweilers, and to C.E.O.’s“, I truly hoped that perhaps our Pay Czar had retained Cesar Millan – star of “The Dog Whisperer”, a show where, yeah, a guy is paid a lot of money to correct dogs’ behaviors, e.g., irrational fear of your sofa – to sit in the offices of the big banksters and supervise all bonus decisions this year, going “tsst!!” if they tried to give away too much cash.

Not the case. I think the NYT thesis is that if we can still care about such frivolity – hell, if we can still afford to have pets in the first place – that not only are we still well off but there’s a multitude of people with too much money and time on their hands that we can still wage class warfare on:

“World transformation begins with self-transformation,” he advises. To achieve that, he says, you need a co-pilot: “My suggestion is you have somebody next to you that is willing at any time to transform the moment. That is called dog.”

THERE are 65 million dogs in the United States, where pet care is close to a $40 billion industry. By one estimate, dog owners spend an average of $11,000 over each pet’s lifetime. And even during a recession, such spending shows no signs of flagging. Simply put, Americans are nuts about their pets.

Or maybe we’re just nuts. Which is pretty much the underlying message of “Dog Whisperer.”

In truth, some of the examples are totally ridiculous:

Mr. Millan says [Michael] Eisner, whose home he visited for a private consultation, told him there was no way his German shepherd would get on a treadmill. “I said, ‘Well, sir, that’s your opinion.’ In less than three minutes, the dog was on the treadmill,” he recalls.

So his dog didn’t want to use a treadmill. I would think that when confronted with this problem, a person would choose to walk their dog, or perhaps in Eisner’s case to suggest an assistant take a stroll down to Starbucks to pick up some coffee and take the pup along to stretch its legs. That he would hire a dog therapist to overcome the dog’s fear of a treadmill instead of exploring one of these other two options prob does a lot to explain why so many at Disney was overjoyed to have him out.