Why dog-walking is fascist

Do you own – or have you ever owned – a dog? A cat? A budgie? Have you ever allowed your children to keep hamsters, or guinea pigs, or rabbits, or goldfish?

If so, you’re a cruel, hateful bigot who will be condemned by future generations the way we today condemn the owners of slaves.

That, at any rate, is the impression given by an article in The Guardian this week, which reported the views of leading “ethicists” (I’d never come across an ethicist before, but I gather it means someone who is professionally qualified to know better than the rest of us). According to the ethicists, keeping a pet is wrong.

“Pet ownership is problematic because it denies animals the right of self-determination,” I learnt. “We dictate what they eat, where they live, how they behave, how they look.”

I’m ashamed to admit that I’d never thought of it like that before. My wife and I used to have a cat, but sadly he got run over. I always assumed it was an accident, but I now realise he was simply trying to escape the intolerable daily oppression of free food, comfort and shelter.

Are other pets as miserable as ours must have been? Frustratingly, all the voices quoted in the Guardian’s report were human, so I carried out some interviews of my own.

“Ordinary British animals are crying out for self-determination,” said Buster, a four-year-old dachshund from Gosport, Hampshire. “We want the right to lead our own lives, make our own decisions – but the discrimination and prejudice we face from human beings make it impossible. The moment I walk through the door for a job interview, I can tell from their faces that I might as well not have bothered. Did you know that on the boards of FTSE 100 firms, just two per cent of directors are geese?”

“Life as a pet is suffocatingly repressive,” said Nemo, a nine-month-old koi carp in Cheadle, Staffordshire. “I’m so sick of being forced to swim around this pond all day. I can’t tell you how I long to be released into the wild, so that I can roam the woods and hills, eat fruit in the orchards and make love in the fields, free at last to live as I choose.”

Sobering words. The Guardian’s ethicists are right. It’s time to stop treating pets as inferiors. To start fetching our own sticks. To abandon our outdated notions of what constitutes a “good dog” and a “bad dog”. Let the campaign for species equality begin today.

Not until a King Charles spaniel enters 10 Downing Street can we call ourselves a true democracy.