diana, fergie, and oh yeah, mary
by julie savage parker

Mary Hourihan is the third woman to run the pet supply store that sits quietly just north of Beaver Lake on Merrimon in Asheville. Well if truth be known, Mary is a mere handmaiden, a lady-in-waiting, so to speak, to their royal majesties Fergie and Diana, the four-leggeds who are the power behind Mary's throne.

But first, the once-upon-a-time part. Ahem. Once upon a time, (a little more than a dozen years ago) Mary and her husband Bob moved to Asheville and toyed for a bit with the antiques market—just long enough to become, uh, disenchanted. Then they bought Asheville Pet Supply more or less on a lark, and ended up biting off much more than they really planned to chew. "When you own a small business," Mary says, "you have a lot of hats to wear!" (The Cat in the Hat flashes by, nodding knowingly to Mary as he passes.)

"When we first took over the store, Pet Love at the mall and Exotic Pets were the only related stores around." (And what a testament to the persistence of women that this small shop has been consecutively woman-owned for 25 years.) Over time Mary has taken over the two adjacent stores and greatly expanded the variety of nutritious dog and cat foods, supplies, and toys. Reps claim that Asheville Pet Supply is the place to go for toys.

Though her business is thriving, when I ask her what she would most like to see in our profiles of local women business owners, she says she wants to read about their motivation, what keeps them going. "I want to know how other women juggle 20 balls in the air without losing their minds." Mary's last vacation was sometime in 1993, and you'll often see her after closing time, still hard at work and still open for business.
"The thing that saves me is that I love what I do. I love the people."

She has a strong business background which she feels goes a long way to ensure her success. She also keeps on top of what's going on in the world of pet products. Mary Hourihan provides for her customers quite a variety of healthy foods for dogs and cats. Apparently more and more people are catching on that ordinary commercial dog food can seriously compromise an animal's health. Aside: I first learned from Michael W. Fox—a veterinarian, former vice-president of the Humane Society of the United States, and prolific writer of books about animals, bioethics, pet food, and the animal/human connection—about the dangers of the garden variety commercial dog food, while our dogs were playing at their (unofficial) dog park in DC. It would be quite good to inform yourself about what really is and is not nutritious for your animals. Discover for yourself after a bit of research that it is a misguided concept that dogs should never be given "people food", but instead the huge, cheap bags of heaven-knows-what you pick up at the grocery store.

Asheville Pet Supply even has a frozen raw food blend for dogs. Mary obviously keeps up carefully with Whole Dog Journal. No dusty, backwoods pet supply store, this store's shelves are lined with yogurt chips for rabbits, hammocks for ferrets, "Jungle decks" for reptiles, hanging fabric hideaways for birds. And there's iguana food, tropical fruit snack bars for parrots, and even flower remedies, essences, and herbal tinctures for your beloved fur (finned, feathers, scaled, etc.) family. People take great pains to create appropriate habitat and diet for the animals they love.

There is a constant stream of people who deeply love their animals coming through her doors. I believe they detect a kindred spirit. Mary's intent is that each person who enters the store feels better when she leaves than when she came in. (Or was that Fergie?)

Asheville Pet Supply
1451 N. Merrimon
Asheville, North Carolina
(828) 252-2054
hours: m-f 10-7 sat 10-6

FERGIE ~ PHOTO BY RITA MCCLELLAN