The Family Costume Has Four Legs Now

A dog in a pumpkin costume is no longer remarkable and that may be the most remarkable thing about it.

Pet Halloween costumes have existed for years, but the category has matured into something more revealing than a novelty aisle. PetSmart's newest Thrills & Chills collection is built around the assumption that the animal is not simply present for Halloween. The animal is a participant, photographed, dressed, brought into the gathering and assigned a look that supposedly matches a personality.

In a Sept. 9 announcement, PetSmart Canada described Halloween as more than a one-night celebration for pet owners, pointing to trick-or-treating, family photos, neighborhood costume contests and festive gatherings as occasions in which pets now take part. The 2026 collection includes costumes, toys, treats and seasonal accessories for dogs, cats, reptiles and small pets. The costume list ranges from pumpkins, bats, devils and angels to dragons, dinosaurs, lobsters, cowboys, bananas and Highland cows. There is even a grooming package with a pumpkin-spice-latte spritz and a candy-corn bandana.

The easy response is to laugh at the specificity of it. A bearded dragon can be a hot dog now. A small animal can become a Highland cow. Somewhere, presumably, a person is looking at a rabbit and deciding whether its inner truth is more pumpkin or banana.

But the retail logic is not random. It reflects a much larger change in how people position animals inside the household.

PetSmart's U.S. Halloween shop makes that scale visible. As of Sept. 9, the retailer's site listed 576 Halloween products and organized the category under the heading 'Shop by trick-or-treater,' with separate paths for dogs, cats, fish, reptiles and small pets. That phrasing does more cultural work than it appears to. A trick-or-treater is not household inventory. A trick-or-treater has a role in the ritual.

The same shift shows up in national consumer data. In the National Retail Federation's 2025 Halloween survey, the most recent annual survey available before this year's Halloween season was fully underway, 23 percent of consumers said they planned to dress up their pets. NRF estimated spending on pet costumes at $860 million. Pumpkin was the most popular choice, followed by hot dog, bumblebee, ghost and superhero.

The American Pet Products Association has documented the same movement in broader terms. Its 2025 Dog & Cat Report described dogs and cats as increasingly integrated into owners' lives. One of the more striking findings was not about food, veterinary care or exercise. It was about celebration: 21 percent of cat owners said they held holiday or birthday parties for their cats in 2024, a 250 percent increase from 2018. Thirty-four percent bought pet-themed merchandise.

Once people start throwing the cat a birthday party, Halloween apparel stops looking like an isolated retail oddity. It becomes another piece of household ritual infrastructure.

Families are partly made through repetition. Birthdays, holidays, vacations, annual photographs, meals, inside jokes and traditions tell everyone who belongs and how they belong. Participation matters because the ritual itself marks membership. You are in the Christmas card. You sit at the birthday table. You come on the trip. You have a stocking. You have a costume. Pets have moved steadily into those frames.

The language around the products makes that shift especially visible. PetSmart says the collection offers a costume for every pet personality. That is marketing language, certainly, but it works because owners already narrate pets this way. The dog is dramatic. The cat is judgmental. The rabbit is chaotic. The guinea pig is somehow a tiny elderly landlord. Anyone who lives with an animal for long enough tends to develop a vocabulary for who that animal is.

Halloween gives that vocabulary a costume department. An angel-and-devil set is funny because it lets an owner externalize a story they already tell. The cowboy is not merely a cowboy; he is the dog who 'acts like a cowboy.' The princess outfit belongs to a particular cat because everyone in the household has agreed, without ever holding a meeting, that she is obviously a princess. The costume becomes a visual shorthand for the pet's place in family mythology.

This is where pet humanization becomes more interesting than the usual accusation that people simply treat animals like children. The more precise change is that animals are being given social identities inside human systems. They are not expected to become people. They are expected to become themselves in a way that humans can recognize, photograph and share.

Retailers are very good at finding the commercial surface area of that instinct. A holiday once required candy, decorations and costumes for people. Now it can support pet beds, collars, themed toys, seasonal treats, grooming add-ons and apparel for species that historically had very little need for polyester pumpkins. The market expands because the definition of the celebrating household has expanded.

None of that means the pet understands Halloween. That obvious fact is also the useful boundary.

The ASPCA advises owners not to put dogs or cats in costumes unless they know the animal enjoys it. Costumes should not restrict movement, sight, breathing, barking or meowing, and small or dangling pieces can create choking hazards. If an animal shows distress or abnormal behavior, the organization recommends skipping the costume or using something simpler, such as a festive bandana. PetSmart's own current Halloween guidance similarly tells owners not to leave dressed pets unattended, to watch for overheating, use reflective gear at night and give costumes a trial run before the holiday.

That creates a distinction worth keeping: inclusion is not the same thing as conscription. A pet can occupy an important place in a family's rituals without being required to perform enthusiasm for all of them. There is a point at which 'the dog is part of everything we do' can become 'the dog must participate in everything we want to do.' The first is attachment. The second can become projection.

Halloween makes that tension easy to see because costumes are so visibly for us. The dog does not need to be a lobster. The dog is not experiencing an identity crisis that only a lobster suit can resolve. The human wants the image, the joke, the shared moment and the memory.

That does not make the moment meaningless. In fact, it may explain why the category has become so large. People do not spend hundreds of millions of dollars dressing animals for Halloween because the animals require Halloween apparel. They do it because rituals help humans express attachment, and pets increasingly occupy a place in those attachments that feels structurally similar to family.

The commercial language has caught up. Pet parent. Trick-or-treater. Personality. Family photo. Holiday gathering. Matching costume.

The product is a tiny piece of fabric. The underlying proposition is that the household would feel incomplete if the animal were left outside the story.

That is why a Halloween collection can tell us something useful even if nobody involved takes the pumpkin hat particularly seriously.

The costume is silly but the social change underneath it isn't.

Season Details

SOURCE NOTES

• PetSmart Canada — 2026 Thrills & Chills Halloween collection release, Sept. 9, 2026
• PetSmart U.S. Halloween shop
• National Retail Federation — 2025 Halloween consumer survey
• American Pet Products Association — 2025 Dog & Cat Report release
• ASPCA — Halloween Safety Tips