We’re barking mad - Haute cuisine for dogs? It’s gone too far

NOT content with turning our prepubescent daughters into playground Lolitas, it seems we’ve decided to confer membership of the slow food movement on our dogs.

Irish Dogs for Fine Dining as it were.

Irish stew with lamb, potatoes, carrots and barley; mediterranean chicken with green beans and pasta in tomatoes; beef with carrots and haricot beans in onion gravy, as well as lamb terrine with garden peas in a mint jelly are some of the options being used to tease bewildered dog owners. The wonder is that they don’t offer low cal, low fat or vegetarian options. Maybe dairy-free for the really sensitive tabbies.

You can hear the ad: “Is your cat traumatised? GM-free, soya milk and organic chicken liver paté in a cranberry jelly infused with St John’s Wort is the answer. When surveyed nine out of 10 cats preferred organic cranberries.”

Was the survey done over the phone? By e-mail? By text possibly? Did the cats fill in a form? Did they have translators or was the information transferred by osmosis? The mediums so beloved by Archbishop Brady maybe? Is there absolutely no end to our gullibility?

Consumers spend €74 million a year on dog food; that’s just the dogs. The cats, the hamsters, the gold fish, the pigeons and the bloody blue budgies get another slice of the cake. If it was not so utterly tragic it would be laughable. Are we so affluent that we can think of nothing better to do with our money? Nothing more meaningful? Are our lives so loveless, so lonely, so isolated from the struggles all around us that we’ve made dogs and cats something they are not?

Keeping a pet more often than not is an enriching experience, one that teaches responsibility and often kindness to a rough child. Pet ownership also teaches the inevitability of mortality — most pets fall off their perch before their owners.

It’s fine to keep pets as long as we can keep a sense of perspective as well. Cats and dogs are not “him” or “her”, they are “its” and they don’t have “babies”. Ever.

Where will it end? Plastic surgery for the backyard Tom, scarred by too much night rambling and bird killing or maybe a nip and tuck job for the porky pom?

Somebody once said that cocaine was God’s way of telling us we had too much money. It may be that God has chosen another way to impart his message but most certainly the line between the indulgently ludicrous and the obscene has been crossed.