It’s time to get rid of your pet

Around the tolerant British dining table, there are few opinions which will see you shunned, instantly. ‘Bring back the birch’ might be one, unless you’re supping with someone who recently had a bike stolen. ‘Xi Jinping has really good hair’ will certainly silence people. However if you say ‘keeping pets is usually wrong, especially cats and dogs’, I can guarantee universal rejection.

Still, the point needs to be repeated – not least because we have new, disturbing evidence of the damage these pets are doing: to the environment.

That evidence comes in the ongoing collapse in British insect life. This terrible decline has been recorded in multiple ways, as Britain is a country densely populated with the type of people who notice this stuff: from amateur nature-watchers, to worried zoologists, to contrarian petrolhead-turned-hobby-farmer Jeremy Clarkson – who recently noted: ‘Just been for a walk round the farm and I’m a bit alarmed by how few butterflies there are.