Few people are more ignorant of the real welfare needs of their animals than the ordinary British pet owner. We are, when it comes down to it, a nation of self-lovers, our "love" for animals expressing itself not as a life-giving desire to liberate them, but rather as a desire to possess and consume. We feed emotionally on dog, cat or budgerigar, just as assuredly as we feed bodily on chicken, pig and bullock.
The word "pet" now has been almost entirely eradicated from the vocabulary of official reports and veterinary papers. The phrase "companion animal" is used to underline the importance of its contribution to human psychological health - a phrase which makes no attempt to disguise the imbalance of the owner animal relationship. It is the human who gets the companionship, the pet which sacrifices its "natural" existence as a social or tribal animal, and submits to life in an alien environment where for the most part, it is beyond the reach of all legal safeguards.
Nobody can count every stick insect, mouse and gerbil, but the best estimate is that 20.9 million households in Britain contain some sort of pet. Most popular is the dog (5.9 million households), followed by cat (4.5 million), fish (3.6 million) and budgerigar (1.3 million). Many of them are kept in conditions which, if they were imposed on a laboratory or zoo animal, would contravene the law, or at least fuel a campaign for legislative change.
The Home Office code of practice for the housing of animals used in scientific procedures, for example, insists that mice, rats, cats and rabbits wherever possible should be kept in social groups. If rabbits are kept singly, then their cages should at least be large enough for them to lie at full stretch from corner to corner. Similarly, there is a minimum permissible floor area (4.5 sq m) for a dog pen.
These specifications are in no way arbitrary: they take into account each animal's natural habit and its capacity to suffer distress if its social behaviour is frustrated. An animal sold as a family pet, by contrast, is all too literally on its own. It has no Home Office code of practice, no regular veterinary inspection, no trained handler, nobody to protect it from unnecessary cosmetic surgery, tail-docking or ear-clipping. Usually, the most it can hope for is the anthropomorphic projection of its master's or mistress's own, often fragile, emotional needs, and consequent choc-fed mistreatment as a small furry human, "a member of the family". Its behaviour is likely to be interpreted in human rather than animal terms, so that its real behavioural needs are often grotesquely misunderstood.
Very many owners who run into problems with their dogs do so precisely for this reason, by misunderstanding their body language. The question: "Who's taking who for a walk?", often asked jokingly of an owner with an over-eager dog straining at the lead, is in fact very far from a joke. Misunderstandings over hierarchy are at the root of much apparently unpredictable canine behaviour. What is "obvious" to a human may be very far from obvious to a dog, and vice-versa. Each only too easily can read the wrong message into the other's behaviour, so that both believe they are the dominant partner in the relationship, commanding submission from the other. This is when a mistimed pat on the head can affront a dog's self-opinion, so that it literally bites the hand that feeds it.
Over-aggression and hyperactivity, defecating in the house, prolonged barking and damage to the home while the owner is absent are all symptoms of behavioural deprivation or human misunderstanding. The responsible owner takes advice from a vet or animal psychologist. The irresponsible - or weak-willed, or impoverished - owner simply will not, or cannot, cope. It is a sad but unavoidable truth that the kind of owner who most "needs" the companionship of an animal is the very person who is least likely to be capable of dealing with a crisis.
The pioneering animal psychologist Roger Mugford is in no doubt. "Behaviour problems," he says, "are the biggest premature killers of dogs in this country." Every day, some 1,000 rejected pets are put down by the various responsible authorities - a statistic which underpins the RSPCA's campaign for a compulsory dog registration scheme.
Most of the animals brought to Mugford's practice in Chertsey are dogs with "dominance aggression" problems - those which believe themselves socially superior to their "masters". But, in common with many other vets and ethologists, he does not share the popular dog-lobby view that there are no bad dogs, only bad owners. Very many of the character traits which are most undesirable in human terms are genetically based, the result of "pure" or selective breeding.
Mugford's consulting rooms in particular see a disproportionately large number of Cocker spaniels, retrievers, Yorkshire and West Highland white terriers which show aggression to their owners. The German shepherd (Alsatian), being nervous, aggressive over its territory and over-dependent on its owners, is a too-common culprit in bite-injuries to strangers; and the Labrador, which also forms a particularly close bond with its owner, is highly prone to "separation anxiety", provoking it to damaging acts of vandalism whenever it is left alone in the house. The Labrador also shares with the pit bull terrier a tendency to fight with other dogs.
In animal welfare terms, however, behavioural problems are the least of the charges laid against the various pedigree breed associations. So extreme have been the physical distortions, achieved by selective breeding for purely cosmetic reasons in the dog-show world, that the sober-minded chairman of the British Veterinary Association's Animal Welfare Committee, John Tandy, speaks deliberately of the creation of "monsters".
The most notorious monster of all is the British bulldog. Its head is so wide and its hips so narrow that a bitch usually cannot give birth naturally and has to be delivered by Caesarian section. The compression of its respiratory tract (a feature it shares with the pug and the Pekinese) is so severe that it causes serious breathing difficulties and places a constant strain on the lungs. The bulging of the eyes causes both dryness and constant weeping, a certain recipe for infection.
In some breeds, even apparent behavioural problems can have a physical cause. The so-called "rage syndrome" exhibited by some male Cocker spaniels in which the animal flies into an irrational fury and attacks its owner may be caused by a genetically transmitted metabolic problem: the dog is quite literally liverish.
With exquisite tact, John Tandy puts all this down to simple ignorance. "The breeders," he says, "have not shown quite the intelligence we would have liked."
At the Cambridge Vet School, however, Dr James Serpell, one of the country's leading authorities on human-animal relationships and director of the Companion Animal Research Group is rather more outspoken. "Breeding dogs for fashion rather than companionability," he says, "is both functionally useless and morally unsupportable. Cosmetically desirable characteristics do not happen conveniently in isolation. They tend to bring other, unwanted and damaging characteristics as side-effects in their wake."
Examples include the chow, which has been selected to have a tiny, diamond-shaped eye with an inwardly rolling eyelid. This brings the ends of the lashes into constant contact with the cornea, causing acute discomfort, scratching and infection. The basset hound, bloodhound and St Bernard are bred to have lower eyelids so droopy that they are turned almost inside out causing damaging dryness to the eye and pulling down the upper eyelid so far that in extreme cases the animal cannot even see properly. The dachshund has been so tormented on the rack of selective breeding that its back can no longer take the strain and it suffers constant disc pain.
The problem, in Serpell's view, is not so much ignorance as the obduracy of breed societies which refuse to accept that their breed specifications are anyone's business but their own.
This view is not entirely contested by the Kennel Club itself. The man charged with the uneviable task of producing a completely revised set of breed specifications in 1986 was the chairman of the Crufts Committee, veterinary surgeon Mike Stockman. His problem was that the Kennel Club itself has no power to impose new specifications against the will of the societies. He could recommend, but he could not insist.
"My instructions from the Kennel Club," he says, "were that any breed characteristics which we judged to be against the best interests of the dog should be altered, or at least toned down." He is anxious, however, that the extent and degree of this should not be exaggerated. "The vast majority of pedigree dogs in this country," he says, "are perfectly fit, healthy, acceptable animals that live a good life and behave perfectly normally."
Of the 160 registered breeds, he decided that some 20 needed attention and set to work, as he puts it, "to tidy them up". To what effect? "I wouldn't say our efforts were crowned with all the success I would have liked. From the bulldog breeders, for example, I could get no co-operation at all, beyond the deletion of one phrase - 'the bigger the better' - from the specification for the animal's head. On balance, I would have to say that the new specifications overall are not perfect, but better than they were."
Negotiated improvements include a rewording of the breed standards to improve the shape of the chow's and bloodhound's eyelids but, as Stockman himself points out, this does not mean that the defects will disappear overnight. First, no matter what the breed specifications may say, there is the not inconsiderable problem of persuading conservatively-minded show judges to change their criteria. And secondly, there is a genetic problem. Breeding a characteristic into a dog is one thing; breeding it out again is quite another. If the entire existing breeding stock of bloodhounds has drooping eyelids and over-long ears, then how can one expect to be able to breed puppies without them?
"It will," says Stockman drily, "take many generations."
The RSPCA's chief veterinary officer, David Wilkins, shares all the same anxieties as Stockman, Serpell and Tandy. Another problem of cosmetic breeding, he says, is the increasing fashion for miniaturisation, which precisely reverses the normal trend of natural selection.
"In nature," he says, "and in most selective breeding programmes, selection favours the strongest members of a brood or litter. Selecting for miniaturisation means choosing the weakest, the runt, which means that all sorts of genetic weaknesses may be carried on into the next generation." The problem is particularly acute in dogs - especially toy poodles and schnauzers - but also in ponies, where there is a growing market for garden-size miniatures.
After the dog it is the pet pony - and particularly the urban pony - which most exercises the RSPCA's concern. Child-sized riding ponies are cheap enough - about the same price as a domestic washing machine - to be bought on impulse by people who have no hope of ever providing them with the two acres of space each individual needs. Ponies, even more than pony-sized dogs, are perceived to confer status upon their owners, and are just as likely to be bought by inadequate people for inadequate reasons. Their fate when this happens is much the same - to be tethered or confined, alone and in hopelessly constricting space. In the north of England in particular, RSPCA inspectors confront the problem of the "allotment pony" - ungroomed, ill-nourished, under-exercised and imprisoned in a space designed for a barrowful of cabbages.
All this is bad - illegal even, some of it - but represents only the most prominent tip of a huge and largely unseen pet-owning iceberg. If the RSPCA is concerned about inadequately housed, over-bred dogs and horses, shouldn't it be equally concerned for the shoe-box hamster, the goldfish in a jam-jar, the caged budgerigar, the tower-block cat, all of which are similarly denied the freedom to perform their natural behaviour?
"It is," says David Wilkins, "a problem which worries us. Obviously the best conditions for any captive animal are those which precisely replicate its natural environment, and obviously this is very difficult to achieve with a small mammal or a bird."
The degree to which small animals suffer may be far more than most people realise from the evidence of their own observations. Most of the common captive species, including rabbits, are basically nocturnal in habit. During the day, which is when their owners usually see them, they are naturally docile and supine. But an experiment at the Cambridge Vet School using time-lapse photography showed a very different picture after dark. Rabbits which had seemed content and accepting during the day suddenly became violently agitated and made frantic attempts to escape.
When the RSPCA recommends a hutch of certain size, therefore, it is setting a damage-limitation standard rather than defining an ideal living environment for a naturally free-ranging social animal. At least it means that the domestic rabbit is as well off as its laboratory cousin, with enough space to stretch and turn round in. But the risk of hypocrisy is never more than a carrot's length away. It is even enshrined in the law: you may not, for example, legally trap or keep a native British songbird. But you may freely import a foreign "exotic", shut it in a cage with a bowl of water and a handful of seed, and still call yourself an animal lover.
Consider, for example, the plight of the budgerigar - a highly social bird, a type of Australian parakeet which naturally lives in flocks. "In terms of suitability," says David Wilkins, "it would make far more sense, and be far less disturbing, if one were to cage a bird of solitary habit, like a robin. And what would the great British animal-loving public have to say about that?"
