England expects you to kill the dog
(and eat your pet rabbit)
THE GREAT CAT AND DOG MASSACRE by Hilda Kean (University of Chicago £19.99)
Just after World War II broke out in september 1939, something very peculiar happened in London. In huge numbers, pet owners took their dogs and cats to be destroyed.
Within two years, 26 per cent of all the dogs and cats in the capital were put down. Outside a vet’s in Wood Green, North London, the queue of owners taking their dogs and cats on their final journey stretched for a quarter of a mile.
Yet there was no government edict telling people to do this — they just went ahead on their own initiative, fearful that food supplies would run dry and there would be nothing to feed them on.
Nor were dogs and cats the only ones to suffer. Pet rabbits soon found themselves being forced to make the ultimate sacrifice. A large white bunny called Minnie, beloved pet of the Mayne family of southall, West London, was shot, skinned, jointed and cooked in a pie by Mrs Mayne.
Before supper that night, Mrs Mayne, feeling her two daughters shouldn’t be spared an important lesson in the harsher facts of life, told them just what — or who — was in the pie.
One of the daughters — Alison — was described as being ‘slightly upset’, but tucked in anyway, saying philosophically: ‘ If someone had to eat her, it was nice that it was us.’
Her sister Madeleine, on the other hand, burst into floods of tears and refused to swallow a single mouthful.
those pets that did survive faced an uncertain future. serious thought was given to designing special gas masks for dogs and cats, but this was dismissed as impractical. to try to protect dogs from being traumatised by enemy bombs, the RsPCA recommended that they should wear ear flaps lined with cotton wool, but warned, ‘few cats will tolerate anything of the kind’.
One enterprising dog breeder even took out an advertisement in the times suggesting that anyone wanting to negotiate the hazards of the blackout should carry a white Pekingese — ‘lovely puppies for two guineas’.
time and again here I found myself snorting with laughter and disbelief. I particularly liked the account of two neighbours consoling one another over the loss of their pets — incredibly, one was called Miss Fox and the other Dr Dobbin. What makes it stranger still is that it’s narrated in rigidly po-faced fashion by Hilda Kean, who seems almost heroically lacking in any sense of absurdity. At one point she suggests that any history of animal welfare is bound to be a bit lopsided as it’s written by humans and not by the animals themselves. Yet despite — or possibly because of this — I was completely riveted, not least by what the Great Cat And Dog Massacre tells you about our unexpectedly ambivalent attitudes towards animals. At the same time as huge numbers of pet owners were queuing up to have their pets put down, over the Channel at Dunkirk, retreating soldiers were constructing cages on the beach in order to bring stray dogs back to England. Nothing, though, can beat the story of Clarence the sparrow. When he was only a day old, Clarence was rescued by an airraid warden in London during the Blitz. Fed a diet of hardboiled eggs and bread soaked in halibut oil, he soon rallied. stoically putting his early misfortune behind him, Clarence learned a key lesson — in wartime, you have to make the best of what you’ve got. taught by his owner, he perfected a number of card tricks and, on hearing the words ‘siren’s gone!’, would run into a tiny replica of an air raid shelter. Clearly relishing the attention, Clarence lived to more than 12 years old — a Methuselah-like span for a sparrow — and, when the end was finally near, lay on his death bed contentedly taking sips of champagne. It seems a suitably bizarre conclusion to what is, without any question, one of the oddest books I have ever read.