Pets

Wednesday

Sophia Money-Coutts

Have we lost the plot when it comes to dogs?

Have you read your copy of Dogue, yet? It’s become an annual project: Vogue’s dog issue. Instead of hungry, cross models in elaborate costumes and articles about the sartorial importance of the earlobe, it’s all dogs. A dog on the cover and dog ‘interviews’ alongside fashionable people talking about their dogs. Fittingly, the Dogue competition winner and cover star does look quite hungry. He’s a thin dog (of course) called Sir Spud who appears to be an Ibizan hound. Very Dogue, though, to have an Ibizan dog on the cover. Sir Spud was apparently named by Catholic nuns, would be voiced by Ian McKellen in a film about his life, is a Cancer ‘through and through’ and likes cashew nuts.

Thursday

Sophia Money-Coutts

If we allow dogs at weddings, why not a python?

Three women in my Tuesday weights class are getting married. While we squat and thrust and fling our kettlebells around, there’s non-stop talk of veils, decorations, modes of transport to the venue and whether anyone eats wedding cake these days. Men are allowed in this weights class but, oddly, none ever shows up. The major update from one of the brides this week was that the local register office had given permission for her dog to attend the ceremony. She duly bought ‘a little tux’ for Badger, so he could look the part. How do we feel about dogs at weddings?

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Confessions of a dog hater

‘Do you like animals?’ asked the woman at the door, collecting for a zoo. ‘No, I hate them, they keep trying to kill me,’ I said. That got rid of her. I feel a little ashamed of my hostility to animals, which I inherited from my mother. She was raised in rural Ireland and she loathed the countryside and all its non-speaking inhabitants. To her, animals were either predators or ingredients, and she particularly despised geese, rats, mice, squirrels and dogs. ‘Vermin,’ was one of her favourite nouns. And she regarded the word ‘pet’ as a self-deluding fantasy. Which seems reasonable. Animals cannot be tamed but their owners can be deceived. Any beast will turn murderous when cornered. Dog-hate entered my soul. It festers there still.

Wednesday

Sophia Money-Coutts

Why are vet bills so ruinously expensive?

Dennis refuses to step on to the scales at the vet. Perhaps he’s nervous about his holiday weight. The upshot is that I have to climb on the scales holding him, and then again without him, so the receptionist can work out the difference. It makes for quite a humiliating morning, shouting my weight across a crowded veterinary waiting room. A woman clutching an elderly cat looks determinedly at the floor. It’s our third trip to the vet in a week. Grass seed season is particularly bad this year, they say, on account of the heat, which has turned the seeds brittle and more likely to penetrate paws and ears. Local councils and their obsession with rewilding is also to blame, chunter some dog owners, since they’ve used this fashionable eco policy as an excuse not to mow.

Wednesday

Sophia Money-Coutts

Dogs belong in the bedroom 

‘No dog of mine will sleep on my bed,’ I swore, before Dennis came along. People who allowed dogs on their beds were feeble, I believed, not far removed from the sort of parent you overhear in restaurants saying: ‘Persephone, if you do that again Daddy’s going to get jolly cross.’ I’d be more disciplined. My dog would sleep in the kitchen, like any self-respecting normal dog. Dennis arrived, just ten weeks old, and on his first night was duly shut in the secondhand crate I’d bought on Facebook Marketplace for £20, from a woman who owned a mastiff called Hades. This crate was in my kitchen. Might my single status and attitude towards dogs on beds be somehow correlated, I hear you muse I went to bed and tried to ignore the pitiful mewling. Guess how long I lasted?

Thursday

Brooke Allen

How Fatima Bhutto’s dog saved her from a toxic relationship

From our US edition

Americans who are concerned with heightened levels of political violence should understand that we are fortunate compared with Pakistan, whose most visible political family, the Bhuttos, have a history that makes even that of the Kennedys look tame. One survivor, journalist Fatima Bhutto, born in 1982, encapsulates the family tragedies. Her grandfather, the charismatic prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was executed under trumped-up charges by the government serving the man who deposed him, army chief Zia-ul-Haq. Her uncle, Shahnawaz Bhutto, died in mysterious circumstances, possibly murdered, at the age of 26.

Thursday

William Atkinson

The lunacy of emotional support animals

Naturally, the start of the new school year is often stressful for pupils. Perhaps those anxious children returning to their classrooms this week could follow the example of Milly, a young Lancashire student. When picking up her GCSE results from her school, Tarleton Academy, near Preston, she brought her ‘best friend’ Kevin – a four-year-old ram. Milly says Kevin is her ‘therapy sheep’. He accompanies her ‘pretty much everywhere’. He was her date to the school prom, wearing a halter to match her dress. Milly seems resilient enough: later this year she is going to compete in the Young Shepherd of the Year competition. Perhaps her unwillingness to be parted from Kevin displays her dedication to her work.

Monday

Monica Porter

Am I cursed when it comes to my pets?

You could say my unfortunate track record with pets began in the cradle. At the time of my birth my Hungarian parents had a dachshund named Herr Doktor (because of the serious expression he always wore), or Doki for short. He was very put out by my arrival, as I received much of the attention previously afforded to him, and because my fastidious mother wouldn’t allow him into the nursery. So he upped sticks and moved in with the family next door. But as Doki was unfamiliar with the terrain there, one day he darted on to their driveway at the wrong moment and was run over and killed. While I obviously wasn’t to blame for Doki’s sad demise, I did play a role in it. And in time the incident seemed to fit into a pattern in my life.

Tuesday

Maxine Frith

I’ve had it with neurotic dog owners

‘She’s overweight! You should weigh her every week and if she puts on so much as 50g, immediately reduce her diet,’ one commenter said. Another castigated me for not using organic shampoo, and someone else told me off for my poor choice of outdoor coat. Under every post were furious debates, judgements and accusations. I adore Dixie. She is coming up for four years old and I want the best for her. But she is, after all, a standard short-haired dachshund, not a human toddler – and frankly it all seems a bit much. The number dogs being given fluoxetine, the same drug used in Prozac, has increased tenfold over the past decade. Perhaps that’s because more than half of dog owners are now members of some kind of Facebook groups related to pet health and wellbeing.

Wednesday

Zoe Strimpel

We need a cat lockdown now

I have always marvelled at the attitude of cat owners who point to bloodied arms or dramatic scratches and explain – with docile, almost apologetic acceptance – that Jasper or Bella just got a bit annoyed. It was all the human’s fault for patting them in the first place. Violent animals are a form of domestic abuser and should be treated as such. Why would anyone allow something to attack them – or their children – rather than simply removing the animal from their home? Sure, they are unlikely to maul you to death, unlike the technically banned XL Bullys, but it’s a different story for wildlife. Domestic cats, the wily rotters, are thought to kill around 270 million birds, mammals and reptiles per year across the UK. They’re the nukes of the animal kingdom.

Tuesday

Arabella Byrne

Of course my dog sleeps with me

It's 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious. At some point during the night, he leaves his designated strip and inches towards me, which is probably why my dreams always seem to orbit around being strangled with a velvet ribbon.

Wednesday

Oliver Soden

‘I had once been a cat’ – the feline fantasies of Caleb Carr

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’ I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a kitten who has spent hours scrabbling hysterically at the glass like a prisoner longing for escape. The animal then decides that, on reflection, outdoors is overrated.

Thursday

Jo Knowsley

How big business pushed up vet bills

I was on my way to a Pilates class when I spotted Paul waving at me urgently from across the road at the bus stop. ‘Can you help, Miss,’ he said. ‘It’s Gladys, she’s in a bad way.’ I looked down at his Staffordshire bull terrier and immediately saw what he meant. The 16-year-old dog was trembling, panting and appeared to be struggling to stand. She’d also lost a lot of weight. I’ve known Paul and Gladys for the past eight years, running into them on the street near my home in east London. Paul is not wealthy and has a couple of disabilities. He always calls me Miss. ‘She’s got bad in the past few days,’ he said. ‘She’s not eating, she just paces and can’t lie down. I took her to a vet yesterday. I think it’s time for her to go.

Thursday

Elisa Segrave

Don’t bribe your dog with treats

‘Do NOT look Lulu in the eye. Keep your voice low and soft and ignore her barking. Do NOT make arm or hand gestures. You can give her a treat, letting her come to you or drop it for her. She has been doing well with strangers outside but her property is difficult for her.’ I was alarmed by this WhatsApp message from my cousin. I was due to visit. Would I be attacked by Lulu when I walked in? Surely I wouldn’t remember these instructions forwarded from her trainer by then? My cousin’s family, like my own, have  always had dogs. But I was dismayed that, like most modern owners, they had sunk so low as to bribe their pets with food. I was trying to resist the contemporary training-with-food obsession with my own new Jack Russell, Peggy.

Thursday

Toby Young

Confessions of a catnapper

As Christopher Snowdon recently pointed out, the past few governments have had a habit of passing laws that are either wildly ambitious or incredibly trivial, while neglecting the real problems Britain faces, such as the housing shortage, the productivity crisis and the eye-watering dysfunction of the NHS. An example of the former is the net-zero emissions law passed in 2019, as if the energy policy of a small island in the North Sea can affect the world’s climate. An example of the latter is a bill that will make it a criminal offence to get cats to follow you down the road. Believe it or not, this had its second reading in the House of Lords last week and will enter the statute books later this year.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

The naming of cats

All sorts of animals have been kept as pets over the centuries. We know of sparrows in Catullus and John Skelton. There is a badger with a collar in a fresco by Signorelli – probably not much more biddable than the lobster Gerard de Nerval supposedly took for walks in Paris. The word ‘puss’ seems not to have referred to cats before the late 19th century but to hares, either a pet one (William Cowper had three, of whom Puss was sweet-natured and Tiney ‘the surliest of his kind’), or one being hunted in Surtees. Dogs always occupied a special place, with names and a position in the household. Cats were more marginal, accepted for their useful function of mousing but only gradually being awarded a position of affection.

Thursday

The Spectator

The Spectator’s letters page is hazardous 

Question time Sir: Your leading article ‘Sense prevails’ (13 April) is a valuable précis of the Cass Review into NHS gender treatment. However, it also raises several questions. How are the actions of these individuals, groups and organisations different from those of others who have been found to have acted unprofessionally, causing harm to patients who were entitled to place trust for their health in them? Where was the ethical and executive management oversight within the NHS? What other unproven ‘treatments’ are being carried out under the ever-growing demands for more money to be allocated to the NHS? Finally, what sanctions are to be meted out – or will we be fobbed off with the perpetrators’ handbook: ‘Lessons have been learned’?

Thursday

Tom Stoppard

Why the story of the Holocaust still needs telling

In Chekhov’s The Seagull Dr Dorn is asked which is his favourite foreign city. Genoa, he replies: in the evening the streets are full of strolling people and you became part of the crowd, body and soul. ‘You start to think there really might be a universal spirit,’ he says. I remembered Dr Dorn when I was discovering Genoa in October. Then it suddenly came to me that I had been to the city before. Genoa was where my family embarked for the Far East, when I was 18 months old, fleeing the Nazis. I don’t know about the universal spirit, though. I’m reading Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black. I had reached 1953 when at midnight a text pinged in from an old friend: ‘Who will cross the street when we pass?

David Hare

Just how much lower can the Conservatives sink?

This is the year in which Michael Gambon died, so by definition a grim one for theatre. Of all the tributes, one of the most acute was by Tom Hollander, who recalled how expressive Gambon’s voice was after 30 years on stage. He could reach hundreds of people while seeming to address only one or two. That’s essential theatre acting. When Gambon turned to cinema, his voice had become supple and mellow. It set me to thinking of other great cinema voices. Simone Signoret came first to mind. Then Jeanne Moreau, James Mason, and above all, Henry Fonda. These actors have you at hello. I would have added Marlene Dietrich, but if you can be so easily parodied, can you be truly great? A Los Angeles record producer tells me that teenagers no longer consider actors as role models.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The insane craze for dog ice-cream

During the few hot days we had in June, I came across my first tub of dog ice-cream nestled among the Häagen-Dazs in my local supermarket. Scoop’s vanilla: ‘Tubs that get tails wagging.’ My first thought was that it was a joke, or perhaps for people who identify as dogs. So I looked it up as I stood in the queue, and it was as if a door opened onto our national psychosis. Purina ‘Frosty paws’, Wiggles and Wags ‘Freeze-Fetti’, Frozzys dog ice-cream, Pooch Creamery Vanilla, Wagg’s Sunny Daze blueberry, Higgins dog ice-cream, Dogsters ice-cream-style treats, Jude’s, Smoofl, Ben and Jerry’s… the market for dog ice-cream is limitless and it crosses the socio-economic spectrum.