‘Can my dog meet your horse?’ asked the woman, as her German shepherd lunged at me, making my thoroughbred jump up and down in panic.
We had been riding through the woods, a friend and I, when we came across one of those dog-walking clubs. Up to a dozen of what looked like former guard dogs and their owners came round a bend on the track towards us.
‘He just wants to say hello!’ the woman persisted. How many times have we all heard that from a dog-owner in the park before said beast pounces and humps us half to death? So I told her very firmly: ‘Absolutely not. Do not come any closer.’
‘Oh, but I’m getting him used to things.’ I’ve had this before. ‘Listen here. My horse is not a practice prop for your dog. And I’m not going to be thrown off and have my neck broken in the name of socialisation.’
Owners call their pets ‘furbabies’ and some women have taken to calling themselves ‘fur mummies’
I am afraid these well-meaning dog clubs are the tip of the iceberg. An increasing number of pet-owners do not seem to understand that their animals are, er, animals. A new generation believes its pets are human and should be treated as such. Egged on by charities that fuel anthropomorphism in order to extract ever higher donations and by a pet industry that is doing very well indeed out of the notion that ‘pets are us’, people do not want their animals to be treated as though they were in any way inferior beings.
Apparently we should not even be calling them pets. Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of Peta, that most cutting edge of animal charities, has called for people to stop calling their animals pets because it ‘reduces them to a commodity’.
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