Entire columns of last week’s English papers were devoted to a heated debate about whether dogs ought to be welcome in food shops and restaurants. What an appalling idea.
What is it about the English and their uncritical devotion to pets? I spent Christmas with two cats, a dog, a second visiting dog and a horse. (The latter was stabled some miles away, but daily visits were de rigeur.) Extricating one’s underwear from underneath a cat sleeping in a carelessly-left-open suitcase is a tricky business. I soon learned to close my bedroom door.
I’m not an animal lover. Any class of four-legged creature is anathema to me. I’m impervious to the charm of fubsy puppies, cute-faced kittens and distinctly uneasy around their adult counterparts. It stems from a childhood trauma with a large Alsatian dog of docile temperament which gave rides on its back to small children in the rural village where I spent my summers. To every other tot it was mild as milk, but it snarled at me with its wolf’s face and yellow teeth and I never got over it.
On our annual visit to farming friends I was afraid of the beady-eyed long-stepping hens, the crouching suspicious sheepdogs, the enormous swaying cows with their manure-caked rumps. “Here!” called the farmer, flinging a handful of still-blind kittens at my chest, where they clung to my jumper with needle-sharp claws, mewing piteously. The culminating horror was a glass of milk, warm from the cow. I disgraced myself by being sick. How relieved I was to grow up and never go back.
Not that adult life was entirely animal free. As a teacher of mixed infants, in the course of ‘learning by discovery’ I have harboured in the classroom frog spawn which stank, a hedgehog leppin’ with fleas, hosted a colony of snails which escaped and ate the library books and suffered the company of twin baby goats who left minute but authentic souvenirs in the dressing-up box.
Home, however, was blissfully devoid of livestock until the arrival of The Godmother with the gift of a budgie for Daughter Dear – an ill-tempered bird which squawked, bit and on its daily release, flew dementedly round the living room leaving deposits on the picture rail. Its sole redeeming feature was its colour, beige, which matched the carpet. With no regrets we gave it away eventually to an old people’s home where it probably devoured the residents.
Daughter Dear (who’d cry for the ducks going barefoot) pestered us for a pet for years. We remained obdurate. One night of teeming rain she rescued a shivering, miserable ball of wet grey fur from instant death at the traffic lights. The Loving Spouse was adamant. “That creature goes in the morning.” Every animal shelter was full. Ten years on, Cloudy the foundling cat was still with us, despite having savaged the curtains and ripped two leather sofas to shreds, she and I co-existing in an atmosphere of mutual hostility.
While I appreciate pet’s role as companions, an incentive to exercise or a useful means of teaching children kindness and care, they’re another responsibility, a tie, a long-term commitment. All too often they’re bought on a whim, like toys or accessories whose novelty soon palls. That, sadly, is why they’re cruelly neglected or abandoned by the callous and why animal shelters are always full.
Animals are unpredictable at both ends, of uncertain temperament and unsanitary. People without pets can detect a house with a dog in it, however clean, by smell alone. I’m revolted by the reek of pet foods, nauseated by commercials for luxury brands of the same when children are starving in the world, repulsed by the slobbering affection of dogs, the remote calculating stare of cats and baffled by owners who treat animals like surrogate children.
Try as I might, I can’t divorce myself from the thought “it’s not where they are, it’s where they’ve been” and what they’ve been exploring with their noses and paws.
I’ll be neither buying nor dining in dog-friendly food shops or restaurants.
