(23 May 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 13 April 2025
1. Dog owner Victoria Font and friends singing "Happy Birthday" to Venus, her dog, at Barto Cafe, a dog bakery and cafe
2. Font blowing out candle for her dog
3. Venus
4. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Victoria Font, dog owner:
++PARTIALLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 2-4++
"I feel that she’s very humanlike, she’s very humanized. I don’t know, I feel like she’s going to realize it’s her birthday and she’ll feel like the protagonist. She obviously loves getting attention."
5. People at the dog bakery
6. Dog wearing tie
7. Photos of dogs celebrating birthdays
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 5 May 2025
8. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Marcos Díaz Videla, psychologist specializing in human-canine dynamics:
++PARTIALLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 5-9++
"I believe that today we support bonding with animals. Traditionally, one might have questioned letting your animals on the bed, celebrating their birthdays, or what was called ‘humanizing’ them. Today, on the contrary, what’s questioned is having animals without forming family-like bonds with them."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 11 April 2025
9. Carolina Morales holds her 4-month-old son Benjamin as her husband Alejandro Tirachini holds the family pet Thay
10. Dog Thay kissing baby Benjamin’s hand
11. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Carolina Morales, owner to Thay and mother to Benjamin:
++PARTIALLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 12-13++
"For us, Thay is like another son, yes. In fact, during the pregnancy, we would tell him, ‘ Thay, you’re going to have a little brother, your little brother is coming,’ and we tell (our son), ‘Stay with your brother.’ For us, it’s like that."
12. Painting of a dog dressed to represent soccer star Lionel Messi holding the World Cup trophy
13. Thay and Benjamin on the sofa
14. Dogwalker León Sipes with dogs
15. Sipes putting the dogs on the bus to take them to their homes
16. Dog looking through the window
STORYLINE:
Venus gazes in bewilderment at the candles flickering on her mini birthday cake. The partygoers crowd around her in expectant silence, but she doesn’t blow them out.
Dogs can’t blow candles, after all. So Venus’ owner intervened, drawing a breath and extinguishing the flames to a round of applause before serving her black mixed-breed a bite of meat-flavored birthday cake.
“Venus is like my daughter,” gushes Victoria Font, founder of Barto Cafe, a bakery making cakes for canines just south of Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires.
About two decades ago, a birthday party for pampered pets featuring a custom cake for dogs may have struck Argentines as bizarre.
But these days Buenos Aires makes headlines for having among the most pet owners per capita in the world.
Public opinion surveys report pets in almost 80% of the city’s homes. That’s about 20% more than the average city in the United States, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, and leaps and bounds ahead of other countries in the region.
As a growing number of Argentines opt to be childless in a country notorious for its economic instability, dogs have become the go-to companion.
Buenos Aires is now home to over 493,600 dogs — compared to 460,600 children under the age of 14 living in the city, government statistics show.
Those interviewed referred to themselves not as “owners” but as “parents.”
“Sandro is my savior, he’s my joy,” Magalí Maisonnave, a 34-year-old stylist, said of her dachshund.
“I’m his mama," she said.
AP Video shot by Victor R. Caivano
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