Ballooning dog and cat ownership goes BANG and into reverse in the UK

Ballooning cat and dog ownership during Covid goes POP due to costs of caregiving

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 …

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US families dump pets as caregiving costs surge (Dec 2023)

American families dump pets as costs surge

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 …

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Vet administers a pill to a cat in way which might be instructional to cat caregivers

A Cypriot veterinarian administers a pill to a cat which may be instructional to some caregivers in the UK

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 …

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Veterinary telemedicine is a flop? Discussion.

Vet telemedicine is proving to be unpopular

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 …

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Big bad China is scared of PUPPIES! A dysfunctional relationship with dogs.

Puppy in China is muzzled otherwise the police would kill the animal

“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. …

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Flat-faced dogs and cats’ helplessness makes them more attractive

Flat faced brachycephalic dogs and cats behave like toddlers which attracts the nurturing desire in their human caregiver which in turn makes the animals more attractive as companions.

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 …

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British government briefly considered ordering all domestic cats to be killed

The British government considered killing all domestic cats in the UK during Covid

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 …

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China’s zero-Covid policy contributed to high youth unemployment and great difficulty caring for pets

Down with Xi Jingpin

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 …

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