That's the amount spent by Americans on their pets.

 

Dog TV says it's "the first television channel for dogs," with "scientifically developed" 24/7 programming full of frisky hounds like me running leashless in lush green fields to soothing strains of meditative music. Oh, and no commercials -- not even for dog food.

Nicholas Dodman, a veterinary behaviorist at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is Dog TV's "chief scientist." He says he's long been recommending television as an antidote for dogs with separation anxiety.

"I call it environmental enrichment and I've been doing it for years," said Dodman, who pointed to a growing body of published scientific research papers into how pets relate to television.

"The point of this is not to have dogs sitting down and watching TV for hours on end like we might," he added. "It's just that there's something in the room that breaks the monotony of being home alone.

 Images are accompanied by "bio-acoustically engineered" melodies typically played on a single instrument.

"The worst (soundtrack) would be 'The 1812 Overture' or heavy metal," Dodman said.

The original text in French was about how journalists keep or change the AFP press release, so this moight sound like a nother shaggy dog story, "an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax or a pointless punchline".