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How cruel are you being to the pet you love?
It must be said that keeping animals in unnatural conditions, simply for the comfort and amusement of human beings, is highly questionable.
It's a dog's life. That is the expression people use to describe an existence that is particularly wretched. Yet at the same time, in an equally well-worn expression, the dog is supposed to be man's best friend. The co-existence of these two cliches pretty well sums up the tremendous confusion that people seem to feel about dogs, and about pets generally. We think we love pets, but we constantly abuse them; we torment and exploit them in time-honoured ways. We half-understand that, but we choose to ignore it. I've always suspected that keeping pets is rather cruel, though I've rarely been brave enough to say so in print: for one thing, I don't like hate-mail and, for another, I know many cats and dogs which appear to have good relationships with their owners.
All the same, keeping pet animals in unnatural conditions, simply for the comfort and amusement of human beings, is highly questionable. It took me a long time to understand this, because I grew up in the country, where pets and working animals have a better life than urban pets, and where people are rigorously unsentimental about animals anyway.
The first time it struck me forcibly - the first time I truly understood what a dog's life some dogs lead - was when a London neighbour stopped to talk to me while walking her canine chum. He was whining and trembling, and constantly straining at the lead. She, who claimed to adore him, kept pulling sharply at the lead, and tapping and smacking him. "Oh Squiffy," she said, or some such patronising name, "you are awful. Bad boy. No! The silly boy," she went on, turning to me, "is such a bore. There are a couple of bitches on heat in the street, and he's gone mad. He's a complete sex maniac. It's quite hysterical." And, laughing loudly at him and smacking him a few more times, she went on down the street, yanking him brutally away from any hedge or lamp post that caught his attention.
Squiffy lived in a flat. He was taken for two walks a day, on a lead. He might be let off for a few moments. Sometimes children played with him, intensely, for a short time. Mostly he was left alone inside, sometimes for hours on end. If not castrated yet, he soon would be. Millions of dogs across the country lead lives like that. Millions more lead lives that are only somewhat better, lives that still repress and punish dogs' most powerful instincts. Pet dogs are not allowed to hunt, or mate, or to pursue their intense interest in the powerful scents and sounds around them, of which humans know almost nothing; they are brought to heel as pampered, sickly, sensorially deprived eunuchs. One does not need to be a supporter of animal rights, or a dog lover, which I certainly am not, to feel that this must be wrong.
Yet for some reason it is usually overlooked. There are several pressure groups that concern themselves with the fate of animals used for food or sport or research, but "very little public concern is expressed for the degradation to which pet animals are routinely and continuously subjected", according to the vet David Coffey. Writing in a new anthology on Town and Country, edited by the writers Anthony Barnett and Roger Scruton, he describes, in his courageous Confessions of an Urban Vet, the abuse of pets by their well-meaning but myopic owners.
Bored and confined, they suffer sexual mutilation and genetic mutilation, practised to suit the convenience and fancy of their owners. As well as this, I think they suffer a most insulting trivialisation of the idea of an animal - the recent glamour shot of Monica Lewinsky posing with a tiny, purple-tinted poodle, currently fashionable in Hollywood, springs to mind. Animals in that universe are funny little sqeaking bundles of fluff, no more than easy-care fashion accessories; if they stop being funny, they are dosed with Prozac. This trivialisation may not directly hurt the animal, but I am sure it is bad for humans; it is impossible to understand something, and to respond to it properly, if one does not know what it actually is. The proper treatment of animals depends on proper respect for what they are.
What animals are appears to be far more complex than humans have usually thought. Many animals appear to have a far greater capacity for learning, for using tools and for complex communication than was thought even 15 years ago. Some chimps can learn and use human language. Many animals appear to feel for each other, to anticipate and to grieve; for example, female elephants take care of each other during pregnancy and console bereaved mothers. And the film The Horse Whisperer popularised an idea that horsemen and women have understood in part for centuries, that humans can have fairly complex communications with horses.
Anyone who has been lucky enough to live with horses or ponies will know that it is possible to ride really well, that is to say with the horse's willing co-operation, only if you know the horse and "talk" to it. When I used to ride, as a child and a teenager, I never had a hundredth part of the powers of observation of the famous horse whisperer about how a horse accepts authority and understands requests, but I did somehow guess at a form of communication, including a way of breathing at the horse.
Horses need very careful understanding from humans, and familiarity if possible. Not long ago, reluctantly at a riding stable, I found that my little horse, already tired and sweating, would only go very unwillingly, whereupon the young woman employee, who "adored" horses, instructed me to kick the creature hard and handed me a crop to beat it with, until it stopped "trying it on". I was suddenly flooded with memories of my childhood horror of commercial riding stables. They are cruel, in ways that I couldn't possibly understand at the time; they go against the social and instinctual nature of horses.
Deprived of the wide expanses of their natural habitat, forced into solitary confinement, cramped into tiny prison cells often too small to stretch out in, infertile, lonely and ignored, all kinds of pets - rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, budgerigars, parrots, cats and dogs - drag out a miserable life, a dog's life. I don't want to be unduly sentimental; after all, I am prepared to kill animals and eat them, and I do not believe that animals have rights. However I do believe that we have responsibilities towards them, most of all when we claim to love them.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, November 19, 1998
