Mike Bedigan rages against the arrogance and hypocrisy of modern day dog-owners
Walk through Highbury Fields on any day of the week this month and I guarantee you’ll see a dog dressed in a coat, probably several.
“That’s adorable,” you might think. “Mr Woofles is feeling chilly so he has to dress up in his favourite widdle coat to keep him warmsies. Isn’t that precious?” No, it isn’t. It’s cruelty.
The breeding of designer dogs is an issue that seems to drop in an out of the public eye quite sporadically these days. It featured heavily in 2017, when a horde of woofer-cradling nitwit celebrities such as Paris Hilton drove the demand up with excessive Instagram posts of themselves and their latest pets.
What followed was mass production of animals that became steadily more and more genetically defective. Many subspecies such as pugs, the poster boys of the designer dog world, were bred to be brachycephalic, with shortened or flat faces to make them look cute (read ridiculous).
This “torture breeding” – which subsequently led to a smorgasbord of doggy health difficulties, doggy breathing problems, doggy arthritis and chronic doggy pain – was widely condemned by animal rights activists and MPs alike.
Unfortunately, unlike other mainstream anti-animal cruelty lifestyles like vegetarianism and veganism in the UK (there are claims vegan numbers are heading towards the 3.5million mark), campaigns against designer dogs aren’t quite as fashionable. The cruelty aspect of owning a dog with short legs and a face so flat that if it fell off the sofa it would die, seems to be completely lost on most people.
The infuriating thing is that a large portion of those hipster morons professing to be vegan because of “ethical reasons”, are the same ones traipsing around Highbury with their pets, failing to see the irony. At least my bacon sandwich and leather jacket are out of their misery now.
The dog was the first domesticated species in history. There are archaeological records that show the dog remains buried beside humans 14,700 years ago, suggesting that they were around at the time of man’s hunter-gatherer phase.
Now though, Mr Woofles occupies an almost exclusively cosmetic role, something to feed and stroke and take multiple selfies with (#doggoneidiots). There are three dog grooming salons in Islington alone and one is a “boutique”.
I’m not suggesting that all dog owners are thoughtless sadistic monsters, just some of them. I’m sure too that most of them take very good care of their pets, hence the coats to keep them warm.
Yet the point is that as classic arrogant humans, we put our own fancies first, giving little, if any, thought to other species that might be adversely affected by them. Even people who feed their dogs well and take them for regular walks probably get upset or angry when they see a turtle with plastic lodged in its throat on Blue Planet II.
They might want to think about the double standards of their outrage, especially when their canine companion is sat there beside them, also struggling to breathe.
