Against the pet wellness industrial complex.

Walk into any high-end pet boutique and count the jars. Turmeric chews for joint support. L-theanine soft-bakes for calming. Collagen bites for coat. Green-lipped mussel capsules for mobility. Milk thistle tinctures for liver function. Adaptogenic mushroom blends for "general wellbeing." The same health-food-store scripts, the same molecular promises, the same categories imported wholesale from human wellness. Priced, in most cases, at three to eight times the per-milligram cost of the human versions.

There are real veterinary supplements, backed by real clinical evidence, for real feline and canine conditions. They exist and they work. But they represent a small corner of what is now a multi-billion-dollar "pet wellness" market built largely on transplanted human wellness marketing applied to an animal that can't object.

This essay is about the difference. And about what it costs, over the decade of a pet's life, to confuse the two.