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. I’ve been thinking about that, and about the dogs I have known.
When I was a young boy we had a Border terrier (they are charming animals) called Tigger, but long and peripatetic bachelor years were spent without animal companionship, and there was no other dog in my life until 1989, when I had occasion to meet Fanny. She was living in Camberwell, a shaggy black mongrel whose origins were lost in the mists of the Battersea Dogs Home. At first she greeted me with suspicion, and I wasn’t at all sure how much she wanted me as part of her own life until the choice was made for her. Reader, I married her, or at any rate her owner, and Fanny and I had to make friends as best we could.
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