Somebody once said that the English don’t really like animals, they just dislike children. It was a good line, better than Cyril Connolly’s characteristically over-elaborate ‘Animal-love is the honey of the misanthrope’: our attitude to animals is illogical, deeply hypocritical and too often emotionally false. We ban (or they do) the hunting of wild foxes, while we breed 20 million pheasants artificially every year to be shot, and inevitably sometimes winged and left to die. We pass laws (or they do) making cruelty to goldfish a criminal offence, while the loathsomeness of fish farming is added to the horrors of factory farming.
And with our pet animals we do something else: we sentimentalise them, we anthropomorphise them, we project our own feelings on to them, we think we love them, and we expect them to love us. Recently I’ve had reason to ponder that. As it happens this has been a sad year of bereavement for us, with the loss of too many family and friends, and by comparison with those it might seem frivolous or even immoral to fret over the death of a pet; but we do.
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