Today’s Independent has a story stating that 70,000 cases of animal cruelty were found in Britain last year. The sad news is, it only led to 1,507 prosecutions, leading the RSPCA to call for a new animal welfare act that places a duty of care on all animal owners.
The weird thing with stories like this is, why the hell doesn’t that exist already? Why are people not legally bound to provide their pets with sufficient food/water/shelter? What kind of barbaric ethical wilderness are we in as far as animal cruelty is concerned?
Across Europe, the Brits are seen as being crazy about our pets, and there are, thankfully, a heck of a lot of concerned loving pet owners, who make sure their pets are looked after, feed them properly and take then to the vets when they get ill. Sadly, there are also a bunch of morons who lack the basic human function of compassion, and so mistreat their pets – why on earth do they have pets in the first place??
But it’s more than that – keeping pets is pretty expensive, so we need some sort of mechanism in place to encourage pet insurance.
On the up side, it’s great to see the mainstream pet food companies doing junior/adult/senior cat ‘n’ dog food now – taking note of the high instance of kidney problems in cats, caused by the wrong food. Please get your cat/dog’s to have a blood test (they might need some convincing – our boys aren’t into the vets much at all), and find out if they need to be put on a renal diet, or some other kind of medical diet (the special food doesn’t cost much, it’s just tasteless so it takes a while to convince them to eat it at all!)
So, if you’re a cat owner, get thee to CatChat.org for muchos good advice, and don’t forget to read Gemini and The Colonel’s diary while you’re there….
…and if you’re thinking of getting a cat, I can HIGHLY recommend aged felines – far less skittish than kittens (which grow up pretty fast anyway), harder to rehome, but just as in-need of love and attention. And if you get them from a decent rehoming centre, they often come with pet insurance already in place so even if they fall ill, you’re covered.