In Praise of Modern Britain

Brian Viner celebrates 21st-century pets

ON the road I grew up on, in a Lancashire seaside town back in the 1960s and 1970s, Andy was known to everyone. Plodding purposefully along the pavement, he was as common a sight as the milk float and the postman. Across the Pennines, in a town near Barnsley, Whisky’s daily promenades made him a familiar spectacle, too.

Andy and Whisky were both West Highland terriers. Andy belonged to my childhood friend, John, and Whisky to my future wife, Jane. These days, just as the names John and Jane belong to decades long gone, so does the sight of family dogs roaming suburban streets on their own.

Jane’s parents once got a phone call telling them that Whisky was standing in the queue at the local chip shop. Another time, when the fair came to town, the police called to say that he wouldn’t let anyone on the waltzers. He could be fierce could Whisky.

“They only phoned because our number was on his name tag,” Jane recalls now. “Nobody ever judged us. It was just how things were.”

It was. Mind you, the postscript to that cheerful evocation of 1970s Britain is that Whisky, albeit at a ripe old age, eventually lost his life in a road accident. He was making his way from Jane’s house to her grandma’s half a mile away, when he stepped out in front of what was almost certainly a Ford Cortina, it being 1979.

On the whole we take better care of our pets now. There’s still a vast amount of room for improvement, of course, but dogs don’t suffer awful deaths in sun-baked, airless cars in the same horrifying numbers that they once did. When was the last time you saw two dogs fighting in the street? During my childhood it was one of daily life’s more disconcerting details.

Veterinary medicine has made huge strides since then, too. Our local vet has just encountered his first case of distemper in 30 years. With better medicines, pets enjoy considerably better health than they did even 20 years ago.

This latest case of distemper, says the vet, is a consequence of people not bothering to have their pets vaccinated against something nobody talks about any more. Maybe, one day, human beings will be just as complacent about COVID-19.

That brings me to something else we and animals, working together, are better at these days. At Helsinki Airport, at the time of writing, sniffer dogs are being trained to detect coronavirus. Dogs are already used to finding evidence of cancer in saliva and urine samples. Even rats are getting in on the act. Earlier this year, in Cambodia, an African giant pouched rat called Magawa won a gold medal for sniffing out 39 landmines – and quite right, too.

Here in Herefordshire, we have had more family pets these last 20 years than I can easily remember, including dogs, cats, hamsters, ducks, goldfish, a miniature Shetland pony called Zoe, and a corn snake by the name of

Nigel. But we are conservative compared to some households.

At the veterinary surgery, it’s not unusual to see rare-breed rabbits, lizards and chinchillas. The vets have a collective term for them – “exotics” – and as long as they’re well treated, I’m all for them. Back when I was a kid, nobody I knew owned anything more exciting than a tortoise. The exotics add to the gaiety of the nation.

Yet some things never change. It’s as risky entrusting a pet to the care of a child as it ever was. The corn snake belonged to our middle son, Joe, who one day in the Christmas holidays, when he was about nine, rushed downstairs wailing that Nigel had done a runner. Or more accurately a slither. Joe hadn’t put the top back on his tank properly.

We searched high and low, but

Nigel was gone. A whole year went by. Then I was in the garden when I spotted what I thought was one of the children’s rubber animals. I bent down to take a closer look. It was Nigel, very much alive and hissing.

Animal adventures have greatly enriched our life, and our fund of anecdotes. It’s rather lovely to connect Nigel in the flower-bed with Whisky at the fairground.

Britain has always been a nation of pet-lovers, but I like to think we’re better at it now.

“Animal adventures have greatly enriched our life, and our fund of anecdotes”