A Michael Broad Blog
Ballooning dog and cat ownership (primarily dog ownership) in the UK has gone POP and is now going in reverse with rehoming centres bursting as puppy love turns to heartbreak mainly because of ‘dogflation’ and a post-Covid reality. Here are some facts about the changing landscape of dog and cat ownership in the UK …
NEWS AND COMMENT: This is a sad but probably predictable story made worse by post-Covid inflation. The news media report that American pet owners are concerned about the economy. And some are under financial pressure because of inflation which, by the way, is the same in European countries although inflation has significantly dropped. And …
There are two things about this picture which are of interest to me and they might be of interest to other people too. Firstly, this is a Cypriot veterinarian administering an antiviral pill to a cat in Cyprus. It was at the time when there was a lot of news media reporting on a …
The group of scientists who decided that people care for dogs more than they care for cats, ran a parallel survey across three same three countries: Austria, the UK and Denmark. And in this parallel survey they asked the participants what they thought about veterinary telemedicine, which emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic as a …
“Owner has to muzzle a PUPPY or the pup would be taken and beaten to death by Chinese police”. This is the claim of an animal advocate on Twitter X: Phaedra. She does not tell us why the police would kill the dog or puppy. I can only guess: the Chinese devalue dogs hugely. …
STUDY RESULT PLUS COMMENT: Dorottya Ujfalussy from the Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, has decided in her study that flat-faced dogs (and I’m going to include flat-faced cats) are more attractive to their owners because they are more helpless. And in being more helpless they are more like human toddlers who are themselves helpless …
Cast your mind back to the Covid-19 pandemic which incidentally has not entirely finished. People are still dying of it. And remind yourself that this is a zoonosis or a zoonotic disease, one that can infect animals and the human-animal alike and transfer from one to the other which is how it started in …
NEWS AND OPINION-CHINA: the current news about China, widely reported in the West, is that its economy is going through a tough time and there’s high youth unemployment. It appears that youth unemployment is so bad they’ve stopped publishing data about it. And there’s a link between the difficulty of being a pet owner …
