The Dollar-a-week We Spend On 'pampering' Our Pets

The Age

Saturday July 31, 2004

In his report "Pampering pals of fur and feathers costs billions" (The Age, 28/7), Brendan Nicholson quotes the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimate of $1.5 billion spent on 25 million "pets" in Australia. This works out to a little over $1 a week. If this is "pampering", please don't pamper me.

Infinitely more is spent on cosmetics, tattoos and tongue piercing, the pokies and other frivolous human pursuits. One could just as easily have compared the sum spent on manicures with our aid program, with more telling results. The paucity of our aid is indeed lamentable, but comparing it to the pet food number is using the wrong yardstick.

What I find particularly worrisome, though, is the inference that an animal should rank as low as possible on the list of human priorities. They are sentient beings utterly dependent on us. They suffer pain, fear and starvation at our hands. One billion are tortured, killed, abused every week worldwide. As the Jewish writer and Nobel prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote: "For the animal kingdom, the Holocaust never ended." So much for putting them even lower on the list of human priorities.

Anthropocentrism, in my judgement, is the ultimate crime.

In Australia, we kill about 1000 perfectly healthy, loving companion dogs every week, the very animals we are said to "pamper". Why not cut the supply by banning commercial puppy farms, backyard breeders and pet shops who prey on impulse buying of cute animals only for them to be dumped after the initial fun is over and responsibility begins? Cut the demand by adopting a pet from the pound. Responsible "ownership" (stewardship?) is the objective - and the solution.

Philip Wollen, East Hawthorn