On the second floor, you can outfit your pup with the latest fashions and costumes (small-size only; big dogs go elsewhere). You can even purchase mini-hangers and a garment rack to properly park Muffy’s Hermes coat, Juicy Couture matching mommy-and-doggie sweat suits and hoodies and skinny jeans (G-strings, too).

Designer Shirley Liu started out designing ready-to-wear clothes for women, but then found a great market in designing matching outfits for mom and pup. She says her most popular items are her scarves, personalized jewelry and handbags. “I have a waiting list for some of my designs,” she says of her products sold at Dog One Life.

At their salon and spa, mommies and pets can also get matching manicures, aromatherapy massages and colored hair extensions. But book early, as there is a one-month waiting list for the top stylists. There is also a photo studio, obedience center and a rooftop playground and swimming pool.

In the Dog One Life café, dogs are treated to doggie meals including pasta, burgers and even energy drinks. Birthday cakes are made to order for $2,000-$3,000 and ice cream is available for special events.

There is plenty of gourmet pet food available beyond Dog One Life. A member of the Poo Poo Club, a 400+ member poodle club, makes weekly trips to CitySuper to purchase Prime US sirloin for her one-and-a-half-year-old poodle. She’s a practicing vegetarian, but she’ll sear the steak, cut it into cubes and serve it to her poodle. “Dogs need the nutrients,” she says.

Another owner I spoke to said she’s once fed her cocker spaniel a fresh lamb shank dinner, complete with a no-sugar brownie for dessert. “I don’t feel right giving her leftovers,” she said.

But these indulgences are just once-in-a-while treats, the owners tell me. On regular diet days, their dogs usually chow down on organic pet food and raw vegetables.

If you’re investing this much in your dog, you might as well take it with you when you travel. Luckily, local hotels are evolving to keep up with the trends; the Landmark Mandarin Oriental and Hotel LKF offers special pet-stay packages for pet-travelers, and the Landmark Mandarin Oriental also provides pet toys, food and water bowls for a surcharge of $1,000 per stay.

Even when seeking residence, pet-owners look for homes where the grass is greener. Shama Serviced Apartments has one property dedicated to dog-toting residents on Staunton Street. Bel Air, the luxury seaside residence, has special dog days where pet-owners enjoy a Saturday out on the lawn, complete with special events.

What’s to make of this largesse? Perhaps some of us are in fact treating our dogs as substitutes for children or partners (see sidebar opposite). Or perhaps in a spend-heavy city like Hong Kong, it’s simply another consequence of the economic boom. Certainly no one can argue that the good times aren’t back if we’re springing on mobile spa services (Wash Your Pet, 2895-5022) that offer mud baths from the Dead Sea or volcano ash and wine treatments – for dogs. The Jacuzzi bath and massages are add-ons.

Does Your Dog Really Love You?

In short, no. Not as you and I understand “love,” anyway.

But it’s not uncommon for dogs to act as replacements for human love, says Dr. Stephen Coren, American author of the series “How Do Dogs Think?” “There’s a basic need for people to care for something, especially something child-like, like a dog,” he explains. According to Dr. Coren, the average dog’s brain is in many ways equivalent to that of a two-year-old human toddler. Dogs can recognize about 165 words and signals. They can count to five and even possess basic addition and subtraction skills.

So when you want to understand what’s going on in your pooch’s mind, Coren recommends imagining your dog as a two-year-old baby, complete with elementary emotions like anger, fear and surprise, but lacking advanced emotions such as guilt or malice. “Those are learned emotions taught by humans,” Coren says. He writes extensively about the “theory of mind,” which describes how people conceive of how other animals think. Many people project a human theory of mind onto their pets, believing them capable of experiencing human thoughts such as loneliness and envy. However, “dogs are not capable of having such complex thoughts,” Coren says. So the next time you come home late to find your apartment wrecked by Muffy, don’t think the dog conspired to create a mess because it felt lonely and abandoned. In a situation like that, “the animal was most likely bored and became mischievous,” says Coren. Since there was no one there to punish him, he had no incentive to stop. And if you decide to punish it when you get home at 10pm for the damage it wrought several hours earlier, your dog will have no idea what is happening to it and possibly become confused and angry. You see, dogs even lack a sense of time, according to Dr. Coren.

And as for love? Coren says it is hard to say if dogs can experience the same love humans do. But they are social animals, which means dogs can be loyal, affectionate and will come to your rescue when you are in danger—all traits humans interpret to be driven by love. However, these actions are largely the result of millennia of evolved pack behavior. In pack life, dogs were forced to develop subtle ways to communicate because barking scares off prey. Consequently, dogs evolved to become adept at body language, a subtle form of behavior that many people mistake for emotional complexity. “When you come home after your boyfriend breaks up with you, your dog does not know that. Instead, it simply senses that something’s wrong based on you behaving out of your routine and comes over not to comfort you, but to get things back to the routine so it won’t be confused as to when feeding time is or when it will be walked.”

Does it really matter that your dog might not “love” you if it makes you feel happy, secure and fulfilled? That depends on what love means to you. Says Dr. Coren: “I’ve been married to the same woman for the last 26 years, and I’m loyal and affectionate and she interprets that to be love.”