A bizarre nation of animal-loving oddballs

Nothing makes me feel more alienated from my fellow countrymen

The British are the world’s greatest animal lovers, something central to our identity. This was the first country to possess an animal welfare charity, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, since royalised. Britain’s children would have to wait another 60 years for the NSPCC, which today receives about three-quarters as much funding. Britain was also the first state to instigate animal protection laws, back in 1822.

It is a country which famously gives vast amounts to donkey sanctuaries and where, each year, people donate £1.7 billion more to animal than to people charities.

This sentimentality about animals can sometimes appear quite strange. Perhaps lost in the maelstrom of recent events was this story from the BBC about how ‘Former Home Secretary Priti Patel …. unveiled a memorial bench to four swans thought to have been killed in a catapult attack.’ The MP was said to be ‘moved’ by the ceremony in Essex.

Rest in peace, swans.

About a week later, a Facebook group was set up demanding justice for two dogs shot by the police, attracting almost 68,000 members. Hundreds of people turned up outside Scotland Yard to protest the shootings, which followed reports of an attack on a woman. But these numbers are dwarfed by the million people who signed a petition calling for the police involved to be prosecuted.

This is far more even than the 140,000 who signed a petition on behalf of Geronimo the alpaca, condemned to death for having TB in 2017, an execution process which ended up taking four years because there was so much public disquiet, including a protest in Downing St and an intervention by the Prime Minister’s father. At one of the many vigils for Geronimo, a lone woman stood holding a sign bearing the slogan ‘Alpaca Lives Matter’.

Many will also recall the public outrage after West Ham’s Kurt Zouma kicked a cat, leading more than 150,000 to sign a petition calling for the footballer to be prosecuted. His club fined him £250,000.

Or Mary Bale, the Coventry woman who dumped a cat in a bin and became a public hate figure as a result, an ordeal which inspired various Facebook groups, among them ‘Mary Bale should be made to be ashamed’, ‘Mary Bale Should Go To Prison’ and ‘Death To Mary Bale’ (the latter closed down by the site).

And remember that time when Scarborough cancelled its fireworks display because a walrus turned up and started masturbating in front of everyone, and instead of just getting it to move on they cancelled New Year’s Eve.

Recall that Britain’s most infamous scandal involved Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe, and it wasn’t the secret gay affair or even the murder attempt that really upset the public, but the fact that the bungling hitman killed his lover’s dog by accident.

It’s also worth remembering that the reason why Theresa May lost the 2017 election wasn’t just to do with Brexit, care funding or culture war stuff, but also because the Tories had foolishly talked about reversing the ban on foxhunting.

In contrast Jeremy Corbyn, representing one of the most densely-populated constituencies in the country, understood that foxhunting sickens the overwhelmingly urban British public, and even Tory attempts to win them over by promising to stop the ivory trade made no impact. Such is our squeamishness towards foxes that London is overwhelmed by the animals, and I will often see 3 or 4 casually walking around in one street at a time. The expansion of the local fox population regularly causes our dog to go into a psychotic frenzy at 2am and wake us up (although when our garden was recently broken into, she slept like a baby, which I regard as a court-martial offence).

But then the British love the animoooos; this is a country which, right in the middle of its capital, has a memorial to the horses, dogs and pigeons who gave their lives in the war against Nazism. (Canada has something similar, to be fair.)

And of all the recent humiliations to our country, the absolute nadir was the Kabul dog airlift, and that’s with some pretty strong competition. That Britain evacuated 173 cats and dogs from the Afghan capital when it fell to the Taliban, at some expense and risk, and that the Prime Minister ordered for priority to be given to staff and creatures from an animal charity, is almost mind-blowing to me.

Yet I’m obviously out of touch with public opinion on this issue; Tory MPs received many emails about Kabul, and anecdotally they were strongly in favour of helping the dogs — although this was nothing compared to the number of letters some received about puppy smuggling. Indeed, sixty-four MPs and peers signed a letter urging action on this issue of huge national importance.

Admittedly I am something of a canine-sceptic, and in my experience the British public’s love of animals can border on the demented. Not only does having a dog mean you will occasionally get into arguments with other dog owners, but also the many people who love animals but dislike mother nature red in tooth and claw. 

On one occasion my father-in-law got into a dispute with a man upset that our dog had bitten a mouse. The concerned member of the public then placed himself between the two animals, preventing Twiggy from eating the dying rodent and insisting he was going to call the paramedics, although not entirely sure what number he would call exactly.

(A small piece of advice to political strategists: a National Animal Health Service would be an absolute vote-winner. ‘Our Animal NHS’, celebrated everywhere with little murals of a dog with a leg in a plaster cast, a rainbow and a heart.)

This sentimentality is of course related to the absence of dangerous animals on our island. The last wolves of England died out in the early Tudor period, although they survived in the Highlands of Scotland until the 18th century. Long before that, Britain had been home to bears, which may have still been roaming around 1,500 years ago.

Because this island is a fortress built by nature but also against nature, our instinctive fear of animals has been switched off, which perhaps explains why a third of the British public would like to reintroduce brown bears into the countryside. It would certainly make the annual school class camping weekend more eventful, I will say that for the idea.

Our increasing tenderness to animals is, of course, a good thing, one aspect of what Peter Singer called the expanding circle of empathy. But as our lives have become easier, so more empathy for other creatures can go hand-in-hand with a blindness towards human suffering.

The British airlift of Kabul echoes the sort of sentimentality that was once the preserve of aristocratic women. When Robert-François Damiens was pulled to death by four horses for attempting to assassinate Louis XV, ‘a tender-hearted lady who was interested in the prevention of cruelty to animals was said to have objected to the whipping of the horses, as inhuman, when they were pulling Damiens to bits’, in the words of T.H. White.

It is, of course, well-known that the Nazis were keen proponents of animal rights, including the banning of lobster boiling, anti-vivisection laws and more humane slaughter rules. This is often used as quite a low-IQ gotcha against animal rights activists, but a far better argument against such sentimentality is that it’s illogical and arbitrary. Huge numbers of birds are dying because of cats, some 27 million a year according to the RSPB  (who admittedly might not be entirely neutral in the conflict between the two species).

If we wanted to protect more of these delightful creatures, whose song has such a positive influence on our wellbeing, we would start enforcing curfews on cats, or perhaps even introducing a tax on the animals — an idea that would obviously go down like a bucket of dog excrement with British voters.

But perhaps a bigger criticism of animal sentimentality is that it is entirely visual and shallow; while we protest the killing of one animal, we tolerate incredible cruelty towards millions in industrial farming, something far more inhumane than foxhunting but, crucially, out of sight.

Philosopher Julian Baggini called the strategy of politicians creating an animal-friendly image ‘fur-washing’, and wrote that ‘the government has been drip-feeding news of its plans to ban foie gras. But many of the duck and geese reared for foie gras have better lives than the broiler poultry cooped up in intensive units in the UK. And all the while the government is boasting about ending paltry sales of a niche product, it is also seeking to negotiate trade deals with countries such as Australia and the US that will open our borders to lower-welfare meat and dairy.’

I’ve tried to stop using the ‘future generations will think us bad’ argument to denounce current things I dislike, because it doesn’t make sense for a conservative, but I imagine that one thing which will genuinely horrify future generations is factory farming.

There is surely the likelihood that we will move towards alternatives, whether it’s lab-grown or plant-based products, and that slaughtered meat will be a rare ceremonial luxury originating in boutique slaughterhouses with livestock reared like kings. Our posterity may find our habit of eating factory meat horrific, but it will seem even stranger for the way we wallowed and sentimentalised our four-legged friends at the same time.

EDIT: I originally wrote that, after his death, it turned out that Geronimo didn’t have TB. But apparently he did.