News that the gourmet dog food company Butternut Box has raised forty million pounds to expand its services in the wake of the pandemic puppy boom will surprise no one. More dogs means more chum, after all. But this isn’t just any old chum. This is gourmet dog food, the like of which you may not even sup on yourself. Founded by two former Goldman bankers, Butternut Box promises to deliver a balanced meal of chicken, turkey, fish, or lamb with vegetables to your dog, perfectly tailored to weight and calorie intake. David Nolan and Kevin Glynn who form the savvy former banking duo, even promise that someone will taste the food before it is dispatched to your hound’s high table.
If you needed any further evidence that the world has gone stark staring mad, then please, look no further. I have lived with dogs all my life. I have loved every last inch of them and deeply mourn the ones gone to the great sofa in the sky. But I have never fed them gourmet dog food, brushed their teeth, given them a bath, or taken them to a dog shrink (I’ll go to the shrink before my Pointer does, thank you). Clearly, I hail from a different school of dog ownership, one inculcated in me by my grandfather and his forebears. Think Alan Clark saying ‘I can’t wait to see the dogs’ on his death bed and you get the picture.
Although it might be hard to imagine now, in the era of the dog-as-child, there was a time when dogs used to be dogs. Yes, they were afforded certain indulgences. These numbered sleeping on beds, lolling on sofas, lying sideways at full stretch across children in the back of the car, sitting on chairs at dinner parties and, my absolute favourite, driving, the practice of letting your dog sit in the passenger seat. But as far as I can remember, no dog I have ever known or owned has had its teeth brushed with Lila Loves It toothpaste (£9.50), been washed in a bath with Kiehl’s Cuddly Coat Grooming Shampoo (£20), or had its paws massaged with Snoboos Paw Balm (£12). Even my own shampoo doesn’t cost twenty quid and I certainly don’t intend to take out a mortgage to pamper my pet.
But is what the new breed of dog owners term ‘pampering’ simply a decoy term for making your dog less of dog and more of a human? Dogs smell. Or rather, they don’t smell like us. In a recent article in the Guardian, dog owners are advised to buy Jo Malone scent diffusers (£120) to eliminate the smell of dog from your house should your poor mutt object to being scrubbed with unguents on a daily basis. As animals with a highly sensitive smell universe, I consider bathing dogs to be somewhat cruel. My Pointer Percy is fastidiously self-cleaning and simply launches himself into the nearest river if he feels needs a deep clean (or a tennis ball). On the occasions when he has rolled in fox poo, he wears it as a badge of honour, one I shall not deprive him of. Do I like the sharp musk of fox poo in my house? Not really, but I consent to share my house with him so I either open a window or confine him to the garden until the odeur has passed.
According to Professor Jane Hamlett at Royal Holloway, the Victorians are to blame for the shift in the cultural sense of what a pet should be. Obsessed with domesticity and the home, Victorians assigned pets ‘moral value’. Value hitherto unknown to pets who, prior to the nineteenth century were considered either the absurd lapdogs of aristocratic women or fit for work only. But with status came consumerism, in the form of cough pills for dogs and pet cemeteries erected in London. Well over a century later, pet consumerism still exists but less as a veneration of animals than as an urge to flatten the divide between humans and animals altogether. It’s quite obvious that the pandemic has warped our sense of what a dog is, locked up for months and desperate for company as we were. But enough is enough. Let’s let dogs go back to being dogs and leave the grooming to ourselves. Lord knows we need it.
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