Changing the law to make pets equal to children takes the cat biscuit

My primary school teacher’s cat Sooty went missing. When his body was found under a hedge, I gave my teacher a plastic brooch I’d bought on holiday. She looked pleased but a little later put her coat on and disappeared. We’d no idea where she’d gone, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that my mother told me she’d been so moved by my gift that she’d had to go home for the afternoon. No one spoke about it and she was back the next day as if nothing had happened. I also remember a friend on a hard-bitten newspaper going home early after the death of her cat. It was understood that she was hors de combat.

So I was annoyed to read that teenager Emma Mcnulty, from Glasgow, was sacked from a fast food outlet for taking a day off after the death of her family dog. She claims management did not accept the death of her pet as a valid excuse.

What a hard world we live in, I thought, but also a mad one; Ms Mcnulty has decided to try to change the law. Her petition – to introduce pet bereavement leave – has attracted nearly 10,000 signatures. She’s received a wave of support. One such, Louise Stephen, said, “I don’t have children, I have chosen a dog instead. She is my world. If something happens to her, I’m not allowed time off to take her to the vet and not entitled to leave when she passes away. Yet if I have a child I can do these things.”

I adore my two cats and worry desperately when they are late home for tea, but a pet is not a child, and Ms Mcnulty and her friends are leading us into the realms of childish fantasy.

My schoolteacher and colleague received sensible compassion, but this attempt to make pets equal to children takes the cat biscuit. Blue Cross, the animal charity once best known for providing pet care for people too poor to pay for vets, now also runs an “animal bereavement service,” and has called on employers to allow time for pet owners to “come to terms with their loss.”

But people seem to be increasingly unable to deal with basic life events, such as death. Mature acceptance that life often serves up horrible experiences has been replaced by intense emotionalism that demands recognition from the whole of society. This emotional incontinence is now being translated into law. Such laws may be well meaning but are steadily turning us into victims and blamers who refuse to take responsibility for ourselves.

In the case of animals, vets are partly to blame, cashing in on this publicly endorsed self-indulgence. When my last cat was dying of old age, the vet offered expensive opiate injections to keep her going just that bit longer; for my sake, not hers. I was glad to say no thanks, and I didn’t need an expensive pet funeral or a “wicker, lined pet coffin” for £59 either.

Petitions to Parliament will not stop death or make bereavement easier. Work is the best cure for grief, the one thing we all have in common in our increasingly divisive age.

follow Jane Kelly on Twitter @Janekelly25; read More at telegraph.co.uk/opinion