The first time I saw a dog in a stroller, I snapped a photo and texted it to some friends—dog lovers, all. Together we speculated why this French bull dog was being transported thusly. Maybe it was the owner’s way of getting the dog into the restaurant where we were dining. Maybe the Frenchie needed help walking around in the outrageous August heat. It’s funny to me now that this was a sight ever worth capturing, as it’s something I see every single day. You are more likely to see a small dog sitting in a pram than walking the streets or touching grass. The mode of transportation is so common that there are two dog stroller stores in my neighborhood alone, both of which I walked into by mistake when I was pregnant and we were on the hunt for a stroller. Like, a human stroller, for a human baby.
In recent years, there’s been much public fretting in English-language papers about how Taiwanese millennials would rather have a dog than a baby; the birth rate is among the lowest in the world, and in 2020 the population of Taiwanese pets overtook the population of Taiwanese children under 15. This type of generational generalization, made for everyone to scoff at instead of consider policy change, gets a tremendous eye roll from me, obviously. I love Taiwan’s pampered pooches, except when my baby and I are waiting for an elevator on a train platform behind a long line of dogs in chairs they don’t need. When I asked a dog-owning friend here about the product’s popularity, she gave the answer that sums up a lot of visual trends I see here: “Because they’re really, really cute.”
I also asked about this when I first got here - it drove me crazy bc I was like, they are dogs! Dogs WANT to walk! But the answer I got was bc 1. Taiwanese dogs tend to be small and there are a lot of places without sidewalks and so ppl don't want them to get stepped on when they are in transit TO a park or something or 2. Because dogs don't have shoes and their feet get dirty and they can't remove their shoes indoors like people do! The long line of dogs for elevators also drives me crazy.