There’s a whole swathe of wannabe parents buying pets to ‘practise on’, according to recent research.
More than two million British dog owners bought their dogs to limber up for a baby, the Direct Line survey found. Meanwhile, a third of dog owners without children feel like parents and one in 20 childless dog owners believe owning a dog is more work than having a baby.
It’s hard to know whether to feel more sorry for the dogs or the children. Babying a dog is a sure-fire way to psychologically destroy it and if you reckon that pampering a pooch is anything like the mind and body annihilation that comes with raising an infant, then when you do bear the bairn, you’d better get up to speed pretty quickly, for its sake.
I know: I’ve got both. The dog came nine months before William, the first son. I thought the dog was hard work – until the child.
It’s not just the work involved in caring for canines versus children that’s worlds apart; plucking the odd thorn from a paw and going for a walk every day is a holiday compared with looking after a baby – essentially a form of torture to which you are bound through love and the clear obligation to keep another human being alive.
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