We should not treat living creatures as inanimate objects
When love dies, reason flies out of the window. In the grim separation of property that inevitably follows the end of a relationship, unremarkable objects become receptacles for a terrible freight of emotional significance. Dog-eared paperbacks, elderly sofas, framed posters for long-ago exhibitions: steeped in a combustible compound of nostalgia, rage and pain, they keep the funeral pyre of defunct affection blazing merrily.
And that is just the inanimate elements of a breakup. Children, it goes without saying, are the real victims of separation. But what of Poppy and Luna – apparently this year’s most popular dog and cat names? According to the latest ONS figures, the average UK fertility rate is the lowest since records began. Meanwhile, pet ownership has risen significantly – partly driven by the pandemic boom in companion animals.
The increase in pet ownership is a symptom of a curious shift in the status of human/animal companionship, in which celebrities lead the way. From fashion accessory/emotional support animal (Demi Moore’s “significant other”, a female micro-Chihauhua, Pilaf, is a celebrity in its own right), to life companion and legatee (the late Karl Lagerfeld’s cat Choupette, richly endowed in his will, is possibly the wealthiest feline in existence), and political statement (Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris pictured the star clasping one of her cats, flipping the pejorative Republican characterisation of Democrat-voting women as “childless cat ladies”), pets have become unwitting conduits for aspects of life that human partners and children might once have been expected to fulfil.
In human transactions with domestic animals, the essential needs of pets are often strikingly subordinate to their owners’ fancied wellbeing. The existence of a small dog confined to a handbag, a large dog confined to a small apartment, or a cat kept indoors, is not so different from that of a battery hen in its denial of their essential animal nature. Their owners may fancy that they dote on them, but doting and cruelty are curiously adjacent on the emotional spectrum – and never more so than when it comes to divorce.
The furry objects of celebrity divorce disputes have included Pistol and Boo, the Yorkshire terriers of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp; Hurley, the black Labrador shared by television presenter Ant McPartlin and his first wife, Lisa Armstrong – and a host of confused, anonymous creatures.
Despite this year’s Pet Abduction act, which recognised that “cats and dogs are …sentient beings capable of experiencing distress and other emotional trauma”, for the purpose of divorce settlements, pets are still treated as chattels – as subject (and much more vulnerable) to the irrational force of human wishes as old books and sofas.
Like children, pets are involuntary participants in the turbulence of family breakdown, but the divorce lawyer, Vanessa Lloyd Platt, notes that separating couples often seem more anxious about the fate of their pets than their children. Yet embattled former partners still seem to adopt the law’s view of pets as chattels, with their concerns focused on their own needs, rather than the welfare of their animals.
Preposterous scenarios ensue, including the couple whose shared custody of a cat obliged the creature to make weekly two-hour train journeys between households, along with “iPad contact time”, which one ex-spouse accused the other of attempting to disrupt.
Increasingly, “pet-nups’” – legal documents establishing ownership of pets in the event of a split – are suggested as the solution to future conflict. In a way, this is merely a formal consolidation of the emotional status quo: Brits have a long-established reputation for finding animals easier to love than people. In his 1808 epitaph for his Newfoundland dog, Boatswain, Lord Byron wrote (a touch ungratefully, considering the exertions of his human chums), “To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;/I never knew but one – and here he lies”.
Which is all very touching in its way (though we might be happier if we could find ways to navigate the more onerous task of loving humans). But while wrangling over the fate of the family pet, we should bear in mind the thunderous rebuke of the Ducal patriarch in Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tale of Lord Lundy: “When I, Sir! Was a little Boy/An Animal was not a Toy!”