ON a sunny mid-October afternoon, Leia spent her third birthday munching a gourmet three-course meal of chicken, beef with salmon and a yogurt-based cake atop a rooftop restaurant in Beijing.

Leia is a German miniature pinscher and one of millions of pets in China whose every whim are indulged by their owners.

Rising pet ownership and spending in China is accelerating despite a broader trend of slowing retail sales growth in the world’s second-largest economy. Perhaps exacerbated by a growing trend of singlehood and childlessness, urban pet owners are on track to spend 202 billion yuan (US$28.6 billion) on their pets this year, 19 percent more than 2018, according to a study by Goumin.com, a Chinese social network for pet owners.

China’s falling birthrate is matched by its mounting pet love. The nation now has the world’s largest dog and cat population of 188 million overtaking the United States in 2018, according to Euromonitor International, which is also the year when child birth steeply declined.

By 2024, China will likely have 248 million pet dogs and cats compared with 172 million in the United States, underscoring the huge potential it holds for global pet food makers such as Mars Petcare US Inc. and Nestle Purina Petcare Co.

The pet love runs counter to Western stereotypes that often portray China as a place where dogs are bred or captured to be eaten. It also reflects changing cultural norms domestically: keeping a dog as a pet was illegal in Beijing as recently as the 1980s, because pets were considered to be a bourgeois affectation.

Almost half of dogs and cats adopted in urban areas this year have been by Chinese born in the 1990s and 88 percent of caretakers are women, according to Goumin.com. About half of pet owners they studied across China’s major cities are single and nine out of 10 said they consider their pets on par with children or family members.

China’s birth rate fell to 15 million babies last year, the lowest in six decades. (SD-Agencies)