Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit A WHILE ago in this column I men- tioned the backbenchers who use their once-in-a-lifetime chance to table a pri- vate member's Bill to try to outlaw something to do with furry little animals. Well, they're at it again, and this time they have got in their sights the nation's pet shops. Kerry Pollard, Labour MP for St Albans, has tabled an Early Day Motion condemning the chain-store Focus Do-It-All for selling live animals through its Petworld outlets. There is no suggestion that the shop is maltreating animals; rather, the motion 'regrets the Concept of trading in live animals' and calls for legislation to ban it. In other words, the 24 mostly Labour MPs who signed the motion view the buying and selling of pets as equivalent to the slave trade. The woman who crooned 'How much is that doggy in the window?', the six-year-old boy who drops grains of pet food lovingly into his hamster's cage, the farmer who takes his pigs to market rather than Consuming the meat himself; they are all as bad as those 18th-century Liver- pudlian swells who made their fortune by chaining together negroes and ship- ping them across the Atlantic. Whether pets themselves have any Concept of what it means to be bought or sold is a question we'll have to leave to some clever psychologist who, years from now, finds a way of conversing with 411111als. Then we'll be able to ascertain Whether little doggies have an opinion as to what they think they are worth, or nether all they really care about is a ull stomach, a warm bed for the night and someone to take them for a walk each day — the sort of treatment, in fact, that they tend to receive after they have been bought from a pet shop.
Ross Clark
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