BARKING MAD Campaigner says calling animals ‘pets’ is offensive

PEOPLE should be banned from calling cats and dogs “pets” as it’s derogatory to the animals.

Ingrid Newkirk, president of the animal rights charity PETA, says they should be called “companions” instead and wants “flog a dead horse” to be axed because it refers to animal cruelty.

She would also like people with pets to be called “human carers” or “guardians” rather than “owners”, so that they are seen as equals.

The animal rights activist, 70, from Surrey, said: “Animals are not pets – they are not our cheap burglar alarm or something which allows you to go for a walk.

“They are not ours as decorations or toys – they are living beings. A dog is a feeling, whole individual, with emotions and interests, not something you ‘have.’”

Stripped

Newkirk said calling animals pets was no better than the treatment of women before feminism when they were dubbed “sweetie” or “honey” in a bid to make them seem “less of a person”.

They are so loved that 45% of Brits live with a pet – a total of 51million animals.

Newkirk, who has stripped countless times for the charity’s I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur campaign and set fire to a car at a motor show, said we need to think twice about what we call them.

She added: “How we say things governs how we think about them, so a tweak in our language when we talk about the animals in our homes is needed.

“A pet is a commodity but animals should not be things on shelves, or in boxes, where people say: ‘I like the look of that one – it matches my curtains or my sense of myself.’”

But the University of Kent’s Dr Corey Wrenn thinks people shouldn’t be keeping pets at all and said: “Through this forced dependency and domestication, the lives of companion animals are almost completely controlled by humans.

“They can be terminated at any time for the most trivial of reasons, including behavioural ‘problems’.”