Neatorama spots this intriguing story out of India, in which a man, cursed with calamities after killing dogs years ago, seeks to reverse the curse by marrying a stray dog. This remedy came from an astrologer, which is arguably one reason why I should stop reading my horoscope while I'm ahead ("don't waste time and energy on passing distractions"--ooooops).

Two things about this story caught my eye. One, of course, was the wedding garb: a traditional bright colored sari and garland. The other is the all too Western reduction of the event to sex:

Mr Selvakumar is not the first man to have hit the headlines for having romantic relations with animals.

Last year a Sudanese man was forced to marry a goat after village elders discovered him having sex with her. The goat died shortly afterwards.

I don't think the two events are equivalent, at least in respect to having a sexual ground. The Indian marriage--and to an extent, the Sudanese--is not about sex, but social ethics. Marriage in this context speaks to the disposition of property; the man is proclaiming a shift from disregard to caring. The use of wedding to symbolize this may seem weird in the West, where for various reasons marriage is now more about love and sex than community, but from the perspective of the astrologer and others who follow the so-called superstition the ritual makes a certain kind of sense. It's all about taking responsibility for one's actions, which is why the ceremony is associated with removing the negative consequences of antisocial acts.
As for the social ramifications of how Americans relate to their pets--well, here it's all about the sex.