Pets In Society

Pet Populations

The Petfood Manufacturers Association (PFMA) is, arguably, the most consistent and reliable source of pet numbers data for the UK. Each year PFMA commissions new research into the UK’s pet populations so that both its members and the public can be provided with useful statistics. In addition, a sample of UK adults are interviewed by TNS/Solus Consulting, in face-to-face interviews.

However, in 2021, and due to, what else, the Covid Pandemic, the PFMA survey moved online. The change in methodology meant that the sample size of UK adults, at 5,093 respondents compared with the average 8,000 respondents surveyed in the previous four years, was smaller than usual and thus the current 2021 figures cannot and should not be directly compared to those of previous years. However, in order to substantiate the change in pet population, PFMA have spoken to industry colleagues and participants and it is widely recognized that there has been growth. In addition, PFMA annual Market Data scheme also suggests there has been a population increase over the last year.  However, due to the methodology change, it is not possible specifically to quantify the change in numerical terms.

Such as it is, the PFMA’s data suggests that, in 2021, there were an estimated 12.5 million dogs in the UK, constituting 33 per cent of all households. A total of 12.2 million cats, constituting 27 per cent of all households was the second largest pet keeping proportion of UK households. However, this is not to forget the vast number of other livestock living within the human orbit. These include a vast array of rodents, rabbits, indoor birds, ferrets, pigeons, horses and ponies and the inevitable hamsters. By and large, however, the latter recorded very small proportions of total UK households, ranging from 2 per cent for rabbits and indoor birds to a miniscule 0.1 per cent for mice.

Looking at PFMA data for the nine years covering 2011-2012 to 2019-2020, it would appear that the proportion of households in possession of a pet as fallen from 47 per cent in 2011-2012 to 41 per cent in 2019-20. However, this largely reflects declines in certain sectors. The only category of household pet ownership that has actually expanded over the periods under review is that of dogs; from 22 per cent of households in 2011-12 to 23 per cent in 2019-20. Since 2017-18, the proportion of households keeping a dog has fallen from 26 per cent to 23 per cent.

The other staple household pet, cats, shows a small decline over time, from 19 per cent of all households keeping a cat in 2012-13 to 16 per cent in 2019-20. The majority of the decline has taken place over the last three years. The proportion of households keeping other pets; from rabbits to guineapigs all show declines, albeit that the proportions in these cases are all in low single figures.

The PFMA is not the only body collecting data on pet populations. The Peoples’ Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) also collects data although the latest data relets to 2020, data not have been collected in 2021. The PDSA data identifies 51 per cent of UK adults as owning a pet, with 26 per cent of UK adults keeping a cat with an estimated UK population of 10.9 million pet cats. An estimated 24 per cent of the UK adult population have a dog with an estimated population of 10.1 million pet dogs. An estimated 2 per cent of the UK adult population have a rabbit with an estimated population of 1 million pet rabbits.

Book Review

The publication, on 29 April, of ‘How to Love Animals in a Human Shaped World’ was lyrically described by its publisher as ‘a far-reaching, urgent, and thoroughly engaging exploration of our relationship with animals by the acclaimed Financial Times journalist, Henry Mance’.

Mance starts by describing a day on a beach in San Francisco in 2019, surrounded by no less than a thousand corgis. Mance notes that sand is not the natural environment for dogs ‘whose legs are only as long as ice lollies’. But this was Corgi Con, possibly the world’s largest gathering of corgis. Mance describes the scene as ‘weird’ and ‘glorious’. There were corgis in baby harnesses and corgis under parasols. There were corgis dressed as a shark, a lifeguard, a snowman. There were stalls selling sunglasses and socks for dogs. Mance overheard two people considering whether to buy a corgi-emblazoned cushion, but decided against it ‘on the basis that they already had one’.

For a Martian wishing to understand the depth of humans’ obsession with their pets – what Mance describes as the ‘the commoditization of animals and the merging of our humans’ social lives with theirs’, Corgi Con would have been an ideal first stop. Of course, in California, such extravaganza would not be regarded as unusual; San Francisco’s newest day care for dogs was charging up to $25,500 (£18,500) a year, more than the state’s minimum wage. Google declared dogs ‘an integral facet of our corporate culture’. But pet worship is worldwide; the Archbishop of Canterbury reportedly has said that pets can go to heaven, while ‘Japanese architects have designed a ramp to help dachshunds sunbathe alongside their owners’.

Mance argues that while our love for our pets is ‘easily dismissed as frivolous or private’, in a way, it is revolutionary. Pets represent humanity’s closest ties to another species and, ‘if they can sensitize us, and make us care for other sentient beings, they could change the course of history’. An exaggerated claim? For the last two years, Mance has been investigating how we treat other animals, including working in an abattoir and on a pig farm, as well as visiting fish markets and zoos.  We push slaughterhouses to the back of our minds. We delay turning to the destruction of forests and coral reefs on which wild animals depend. Compare that with domestic dogs and cats. As Mance observes, pets are animals whose lives we value, whose emotions we appreciate and whose flesh we wouldn’t dream of eating.

Mance notes that while wild parrots often live-in huge flocks, as pets they are mostly kept alone. Meanwhile, Lockdown has seen a pet boom. As Mance puts it ‘deprived of the company of other humans, people are seeking the company of animals instead’. Britain’s dog population has reportedly ‘exploded’, rising by an estimated two million. There have been additional complications. Soaring prices have fueled unscrupulous breeding and thefts. New owners have found themselves unable to ’socialise’ their puppies in a time of social distancing. They have struggled on, hoping that their pets would help their mental health, although, as Mance dryly remarks, therapy sessions might have been cheaper. Over a lifetime, caring for a dog can costs a minimum of £4,600 to £13,000, depending on the size of the animal; care costs can take the total above £30,000, says the animal charity PDSA. Americans’ pet spending has surpassed a reported $100 billion a year for the first time. Meanwhile, in anticipation of the end of the pandemic, shelters are preparing for a wave of unwanted animals.

In common with many parents, Mance hoped that having a pet would help to teach his children about nature. Growing up with a terrier, which he fondly remembers as the source of his internet passwords, he now has a cat, which generally lies on his laptop whenever he is trying to work, an experience which is shared by the present author. Yet Mance wonders if pet ownership is not what he describes as ‘a missed opportunity’, saying that mankind ‘needed a new relationship with nature’, instead we ended up with feline Instagram accounts. We love pets, yet accept factory farms and extinctions. Shouldn’t pets spur us to treat all animals better?

The first stumbling block is that our love for pets is not as ‘pure’ as we would like to think. Pet ownership is so ingrained that we rarely question its implications. The relationship can bring great joy, and not just to us: when was the last time you saw a person happier than a dog chasing a Frisbee? But that’s not the whole story.

We have a perception that being owned is an inherently positive experience. Mance is not convinced that it is. He argues that, by owning animals, we take control of their lives. We decide who they live with, when and if they socialize with others of the same species, and whether they can have offspring. Often, we feed them into obesity. Often, we decide when they die.

In Chile, many dogs roam the streets in packs. They have more freedom and, perhaps, more fun than their pampered cousins. In Europe and North America, many pets arguably live in a form of lockdown: they are well fed and safely homed, but they lack social interaction and autonomy. This lockdown lasts their whole lives. Mance notes that ‘we love our pets deeply, we want them to be happy, but we struggle to know what they are thinking’. We also expect them to fit in with our schedules and needs. In reality, many rabbits don’t want to be cuddled. It seems a reasonable assumption that pet fish and tortoises probably don’t value our company at all. Wild parrots often live in huge flocks, but as pets they are mostly kept alone; one study found that American owners spent only 15 minutes a day interacting with their parrots. Mance asks what are these highly intelligent birds meant to do the rest of the time? Similarly, when devoted dog owners return to their offices and work after lockdown, how are the dogs meant to react? Modern human societies may not be easy places to live: nearly three-quarters of dogs show at least one anxiety-related behaviour, such as sensitivity to loud noises. There is some evidence that free-roaming street dogs which, by definition, have more control over their lives, are less excitable. Heather Bacon, an animal welfare expert at the University of Edinburgh says that ‘We have a perception that being owned is an inherently positive experience. I am not convinced that it is’,

What we love about dogs, in particular, is that they offer us unconditional love. Yet this has ‘almost made us lazy about meeting their needs, Bacon says. Nowhere is this more evident than in breeding. Dogs were probably domesticated more than 20,000 years ago. Breeds, as we understand them today, have existed for less than two hundred years. They were standardized, often on entirely arbitrary, aesthetic criteria, based on dogs from small gene pools. This was the Victorian age of empire and of social hierarchy. Ideas of pure bloodlines and racial improvement were acceptable. London Zoo was trying, unsuccessfully as it happens, to domesticate wild animals. Dog breeders’ ability to manipulate a single species into very different shapes and sizes helped to inspire the proponents of eugenics.

Breeding has had indefensible results. Some of our most popular pets are brachycephalic dogs, such as pugs and French bulldogs, whose flat faces affect their airways and much else. Such dogs are as much as three times more likely to suffer respiratory problems. Some cannot close their eyes. Many cannot give birth without caesarean sections. Yet people find flat faces cute and loving. Some owners also believe that such dogs are low maintenance because they don’t require much exercise – in fact, the dogs just cannot breathe properly. One-fifth of dogs in the UK are flat-faced. In March, Lady Gaga offered a $500,000 reward after her French bulldogs were stolen. Mance observes that ‘It’s weird to value your dogs’ company so much, but value breeding for health so little’. We regard eugenics as morally beyond the pale; why should we celebrate the canine and feline equivalents?

Our unethical breeding also affects cats too: Scottish fold cats, which Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have helped to popularise, suffer a cartilage defect. Most Persian cats have at least one health disorder. Put a cat in a wheelie bin and you become a national hate figure; create a cat vulnerable to eye disease and you become a potentially wealthy breeder. As Dan O’Neill, a companion animal epidemiologist at the Royal Veterinary College, aptly puts it, ‘pets health problems are ‘actually human problems’.

Mance says that we could start to solve these human problems. Currently, pet-buyers often seem to be acting on a whim, like the hapless narrator in the novel Fleishman Is in Trouble, who panic-buys a miniature dachshund to turn his life around, but wakes up to find the dog urinating on his head. We could do our research, and stop trying to make fashion statements through animals. We could also try to offer our dogs choice – when Bacon walks her dogs, she let them help to choose the route: ‘It’s their walk, not mine. Advertisers could stop using French bulldogs and other unhealthy flat-faced dogs. Another option would be to push breeders to cross-breed – thus diversifying the gene pool, even though it breaks the supposed purity of the gene line. This is already being trialed in the Netherlands, where the government has restricted the breeding of purebred bulldogs and pugs. Why not be radical, and drop our obsession with pets’ appearance altogether? We regard eugenics as unacceptable, why should we celebrate the canine and feline equivalents? Mance argues that we should start, as he puts it, prizing mongrels. We need to think less about how our pets look, and more about how our world looks to them. The problem isn’t that we think of pets as almost human-like; it’s that we don’t think of them as human-like enough.

Even if pet owning is done well, it only brings us close to a small slice of the animal kingdom. At least 1,300 species of mammals, including both species of African elephant and 1,400 species of bird, such as snowy owls, are endangered. Few of these animals would live happily in our homes. To save other animals, humans must shrink their footprint on the natural world – by eating less meat, creating more protected areas, and so on.

The difficulty is that our love for our pets increases our footprint. We need more chickens, cows and fish to feed our pets: US dogs and cats eat as many calories in a year as 62 million American people, according to the UCLA geography professor Gregory Okin. Pets no longer just eat our offcuts, because we want them to have the best. As a result, feeding an average size dog can emit more than a tonne of greenhouse gases a year.

There’s more: in the US, cats have been estimated to kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds and between 6.2 and 22.3 billion mammals each year. It’s not clear how big a chunk of the bird population this represents, or whether the cats are taking mainly weaker birds that wouldn’t have survived anyway. Mance finds this tricky; while he loves cats and birds, he values cats’ individual existence over most birds. He also recognize that cat and dog populations are doing well, while those of birds are not, and that this puts our ecosystems off balance. His cat has rarely brought anything back into the house, but Mance has to admit that his garden is not full of birds. Owners can try training their cats or attaching bells to their collars. Yet the failsafe way to protect birds is to keep your cat indoors: something that affects the quality of a cat’s life.

Dogs, too, impinge on wildlife – as shown by the sad recent incident on the River Thames where a pet dog savaged a seal known as Freddie. Farmers complain about dogs disturbing nesting lapwing and other birds. Other pets can be even more disruptive, Florida’s Everglades have been overrun by Burmese pythons and green iguanas, which have escaped or been released by bored pet-owners.

Mance stresses that this is not an argument against pets. It’s a call for balance. The world has close to an estimated billion dogs and several hundred million cats. Meanwhile, some of their closest wild relatives are treated entirely differently. Britain has found space for tens of millions of dogs and cats, but no wolves or lynx and ever fewer Scottish wildcats. If we really love animals, Mance argues that we should make sacrifices for them, whether or not they are disposed to curl up on our sofa. If pets represent our deeper love for the natural world, perhaps we could match every pound we spend on them with a pound given to conserve wild animals.

In many places, conscientious humans often refer to their pets as companion animals, and constitute themselves as guardians rather than pet owners. For many people, however, this phrasing doesn’t quite work. It implies that animals are only our companions if we keep them in our homes. Yet where Mance is concerned, the birds in our cities, the beavers in our rivers, the pine martens in our forests are also our companions too, and our wellbeing depends on their survival.

Due to the pandemic, Corgi Con is not scheduled to go ahead this year. I hope it does, but I also hope pet owners look beyond it. There is more to loving animals than owning them.

This is an important book, for pet keepers and non-pet keepers alike. Mance concludes that our pets should be the beginning of our love for other animals, not the end.

How to Love animals in a human shaped world is published by Cape

New Pet Dog, New Car?

A recent report indicates that a survey of 2,000 drivers with dogs revealed that more than a fifth – 22 per cent – bought or adopted their most recent dog after the start of lockdown.
More than a third – 35 per cent – of recent dog owners said they had to buy a larger or more practical vehicle because of their new pet, spending an average of £7,594.

Manufactured Meat

The reason that many people say that they have given up consuming meat and have turned to a vegetarian diet is that they cannot reconcile their desire for meat with the knowledge that, to eat meat, sentient creatures must die.

If a household makes the decision to go vegetarian or, even, vegan then the family dog can likewise be administered a similar diet.

And the cat? Ah No! Cats must eat meat. They are ‘obligate carnivores’ which means cats cannot be vegetarian.

Their bodies need certain nutrients which can only be found from animal meat and which they are physically unable to make themselves. An example of these are Taurine and Arginine, which are essential building blocks for your cat’s health. Without them, your cat could become extremely ill. Taurine deficiency can cause dangerous heart problems and eye issues that can lead to blindness.

Four further rules for feeding your cat. Choose a cat food that is complete rather than complementary so that your pet gets a complete, balanced diet. Cats like to eat away from other cats. Keep food, water and litter trays in different places so your cat knows that their food and water are clean. Finally, your cat needs fresh water, which should be changed daily.

Missing Moggies

With apologies, and thanks, to the Camden New Journal, the local North London newspaper that drew attention to the increasing problem of missing cats.

An increase in the number of pet keepers is responsible for a growing missing cat problem, say pet detectives searching for a lost cat, a Norwegian Forest, a breed of domestic cat originating in Northern Europe. This natural breed is adapted to a very cold climate, with a top coat of glossy, long, water-shedding hair and a woolly undercoat for insulation.

in North London’s Belsize Park, a retired police officer turned animal sleuth Tom Watkins, the founder of Animal Search UK – said ‘keepers’ are generally people living alone and habitually feed cats that don’t belong to them. But they then go further by taking them inside and keeping them for a period of time or, even, forever.

Mr Watkins, whose search team was out last week trying to locate a one-year-old Norwegian Forest cat not seen since 5 April, said he believes more people have become ‘keepers’ due to loneliness during the coronavirus lockdown.

He said ‘We’ve found out over the last twenty-one years of working in this ­profession, that there are always ­different reasons that cats, in particular, go missing. These range from sadly being involved in road traffic collisions, losing their way after something spooks them and they run out of their normal territory, becoming locked in sheds and outbuildings by mistake or being ‘adopted’ – some call it stolen – by persons we refer to in the trade as ‘keepers’.

However, for one family, matters ended up on a happier note. One North London family has been reunited with a lost cat, a 14-year-old feline with a thyroid problem, eight weeks after he went missing.

The cat’s keeper said, following the recovery, that ‘I’d just like to say to people please don’t feed cats that aren’t your own, don’t feed them, and don’t keep them, as much as you may want to. You don’t know what illnesses they may have and how much their family is going to miss them.’