In Swedish newspapers and journals an interview with or a feature article

about a person is normally accompanied by an infobox, where, among other items, there

is a headline named familj (family). Under this headline are mentioned not only partners,

children, and other relatives, but also pets, notably dogs and cats. Our contribution poses

the question to what extent this verbal (written) presentation of pets serves to construct

them as ‘family members’. Based on our findings – the fact that pets are frequently mentioned

in connection with family members, overlap between names of pets and names of

human family members, and close textual alignment of humans and pets, among other

things – we discuss whether these findings should be interpreted as a tendency towards

anthropomorphism with regard to pets, or, somewhat more radically, whether we are witnessing

a linguistic practice where cultural species boundaries are blurred.