12 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.ukestimated £7 billion a year. The humanisa-
tion of pets is fuelling ever more elaborate
treats and pampering, as if dogs enjoy going
to the poodle parlour to have their nails
cut, which of course they don’t. They would
much prefer to be walked more so their
claws wore down naturally.
But never mind. Because we now have
animal social media influencers. ‘Doug the
Pug’, for example, has 3.9 million Insta-
gram followers. Owners call their pets ‘furb-
abies’. The term is meant to be sweet but
becomes more creepy the more you think
about it. Some women have taken to calling
themselves ‘fur mummies’, which is down-right disturbing. One dog-care business,
fur mummy.com, promises that: ‘At Furmum-
my, we treat every dog like a baby because
we know that is how much they mean to you.’
Pets have replaced people in their own
pecking order. A Mintel investigation dis-
covered that 51 per cent of buyers would
rather cut back spending money on them-
selves than their pets, with 54 per cent of mil-
lennials saying they’d put their pets’ needs
before their own. Is this part of some virtue-
signalling guilt complex, whereby we sacri-
fice ourselves for our pets? In the event of a
horrible national emergency would we now
kill ourselves so our dogs could eat us rather
than the other way around?
Perhaps it is the propaganda from the
animal charities. After a while, those relent-
lessly heartbreaking adverts telling us aboutthe suffering of so many poor
creatures makes us feel a col-
lective sense of guilt. Con-
sequently, are animals, like
teenage tearaways, becoming
a social problem because of a
lack of firm parenting? Is all
this pampering and worrying
about their feelings doing to pets what we
did to kids with PC education, making them
utterly spoilt and badly behaved?
I recently witnessed a grown man — a
great butch-looking chap — dissolve into
tears when my cocker spaniel growled at his
tiny white poodle because it wouldn’t leave
her alone. ‘Oh no! Are you all right?’ he fret-
ted, scooping the pesky pooch into his arms,
when what it needed was a good telling off.
‘Positive reinforcement’, which is filling
the void where conventional training used
to be, does not necessarily do animals any
good. Look at those owners trailing lines of
treats which their fat pooches hoover up as
they follow, putting on more weight than the
walk should be taking off.
Even in the horse world, there is a dan-
gerous trend for soft parenting, in the form
of riding without saddle or even bridle, no
bit in the horse’s mouth, just a loose rope
around its nose, allowing the horse to choose
which way it wants to go down the road.
I once witnessed a woman attempting
to load a horse on to a horsebox at a show-
ground by standing him at the end of the
ramp and waiting until he chose to get on.
He didn’t choose to get on, by the way. After
we loaded up conventionally, by leading our
horses up the ramp, she sat down at a pic-
nic table to sip coffee and read a newspaper,
while her horse stood staring into space.
The question I ask myself is: if this horse
was equal to humans in forward-thinking
capabilities, why didn’t he seize the opportu-
nity to walk off and leave his stupid owner?SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
With Melissa Kite and ‘canine couture
designer’ Lilly Shahravesh.‘C
an my dog meet
your horse?’
asked the woman,
as her German shepherd
lunged at me, making my
thoroughbred jump up and
down in panic.
We had been riding
through the woods, a friend and I, when we
came across one of those dog-walking clubs.
Up to a dozen of what looked like former
guard dogs and their owners came round
a bend on the track towards us.
‘He just wants to say hello!’ the woman
persisted. How many times have we all
heard that from a dog-owner in the park
before said beast pounces and humps us half
to death? So I told her very firmly: ‘Abso-
lutely not. Do not come any closer.’
‘Oh, but I’m getting him used to things.’
I’ve had this before. ‘Listen here. My horse
is not a practice prop for your dog. And I’m
not going to be thrown off and have my neck
broken in the name of socialisation.’
I am afraid these well-meaning dog
clubs are the tip of the iceberg. An increas-
ing number of pet-owners do not seem to
understand that their animals are, er, ani-
mals. A new generation believes its pets
are human and should be treated as such.
Egged on by charities that fuel anthropo-
morphism in order to extract ever higher
donations and by a pet industry that is doing
very well indeed out of the notion that ‘pets
are us’, people do not want their animals to
be treated as though they were in any way
inferior beings.
Apparently we should not even be call-
ing them pets. Ingrid Newkirk, the founder
of Peta, that most cutting edge of animal
charities, has called for people to stop call-
ing their animals pets because it ‘reduc-
es them to a commodity’. To which I want
to say: ‘Calm down pet, it’s only a term
of endearment!’
The promotion of animals to the level
of thinking, discerning human beings has
boosted the value of the pet industry to anOwners call their pets ‘furbabies’
and some women have taken to
calling themselves ‘fur mummies’Pet peeve
Let animals be animals
MELISSA KITEDUMMY Main story standfirst goes here. Please keep it no longer than this box, and shorter is probably better DUMMY Main
Melissa Kite_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 12 26/02/2020 12: