The insane craze for dog ice-cream

During the few hot days we had in June, I came across my first tub of dog ice-cream nestled among the Häagen-Dazs in my local supermarket. Scoop’s vanilla: ‘Tubs that get tails wagging.’ My first thought was that it was a joke, or perhaps for people who identify as dogs. So I looked it up as I stood in the queue, and it was as if a door opened onto our national psychosis. Purina ‘Frosty paws’, Wiggles and Wags ‘Freeze-Fetti’, Frozzys dog ice-cream, Pooch Creamery Vanilla, Wagg’s Sunny Daze blueberry, Higgins dog ice-cream, Dogsters ice-cream-style treats, Jude’s, Smoofl, Ben and Jerry’s… the market for dog ice-cream is limitless and it crosses the socio-economic spectrum.

For the ethical rich, there’s Cool Dog Vegan, retailing at an astonishing £120 for a five-litre tub. What’s a one-off £120 when you pay £4.20 every morning for an oat cortado? Mid-market there’s Billy and Margot’s selection of iced treats: blackberry and apple, coconut cream.

Aldi makes its own dog ice-cream, which it launched last summer with a fleet of ‘dog-livery’ ice-cream vans which loitered in parks around the country. The PR photos show happy, patient dogs forming an orderly queue beside them. Aldi’s bestseller is ‘pea and vanilla’. Aldi thinks the pea is the sort of earthy, grounding ingredient that makes this a sensible doggy choice.

What’s wrong with us? What are people thinking? It’s not the expense so much as the whole idea. Dogs shouldn’t even have ice-cream. ‘Dogs are lactose-intolerant, so we’ve made our dog-friendly ice-cream with reduced-lactose milk,’ boasts Scoop’s. If you have to give dogs ice-cream, I suppose it’s best it doesn’t give them diarrhoea. But why give it at all?

A company called Woof and Brew that models itself on the hipster brewery Brewdog have had a smash hit this summer with their ‘Pawsecco’ freeze pops, ‘Iced treats for those on four feet made with pet house white.’