Pets...

I read an article in the Guardian yesterday about the decline of pet ownership (and a corresponding fall in profits for pet food manufacturers). Decline? What decline? From the evidence of my own eyes I would have said that pet ownership was going up, not down. I see people with not just one dog on a lead, but two or three. It looks nightmarish to me, but these doughty pet owners seem to relish the sheer inconvenience of having more pets than a sane person might really need. Couples have dogs, so they can talk about dogs… rather than, say, the existential bleakness at the heart of their marriage…