Animal Crackers
Like many other households of late, we have been suffering the consequences of eating 
Animal life and death seem to be everywhere around us at the moment, what with birds trilling in the garden at 5 am – (lovely, thanks, but could you possibly delay it a bit?), mating frogs providing not just an irresistible temptation to the cat, but an underfoot hazard to everybody else, the giant 
And finally, after the longest wait since Gabriel dropped in on Mary, the grand opening of a new 
In this context, ‘Pets’ becomes an interesting concept. When you think about it, most of the animals we eat are more or less pets anyway. Sheep and cows and little sniffly piglets and hens laying eggs at petting zoos – one way or another, they all inhabit the realm of cute companions. Even deer are basically Bambi. It’s not like we eat foxes or otters or ferrets. When they’re little, we cuddle them, and when they get too big to cuddle, and start borrowing the car keys without asking, we eat them. So what’s the big deal about horses?
Indeed, it would seem to me to make a lot more sense to eat all our pets, once they were past the fun stage (but not the slow loris, vid sup).
Not surprisingly, this is not the best frame of mind in which to approach a rare all-family outing to the neighbourhood’s latest emporium of wonder and delight. Dolly had already armed herself with a VIPets card and a long, long shopping list, but even she was overwhelmed by the lengths to which the perverse imagination, incentivised by profit and riddled with 
Like Barbie World, with an underlying whiff of rodent pee. A place for people desperate to make their pets as much as possible like the children or friends or families who never were. Or once were, but then stopped visiting – or who just, annoyingly, refuse to offer up the total dependency and lavish affection of their Furry Friends. After all, how many children will come and give you a hug whenever you need one, but submit meekly to being 
I don’t know what other couples talk about in bed, but that night, once the reassuringly non-compliant teenagers were safely tucked in, our conversation naturally turned to the absolute vs relative nature of morality; and, in the former case, how to judge a society that rewards a place selling lactose-free milk in cute individual bottles so we can perpetuate the 
I try not to mention my day job at home, as it’s not always the cheeriest of subjects, but it has been occurring to me throughout Horsegate that many of my asylum seeker clients, asked to subsist on 
Mr Fixit, not having been brought up to subject every decision, large or small, to the sort of moral interrogation that kept the 
‘No it’s not, it’s WRONG! It’s a symptom of a sick society.’
‘That’s just your view, you can say you think it’s wrong, but you can’t say it’s wrong, per se.’
‘Oh yes, I can.’
He’s not getting anywhere. He tries changing tack. ‘Wrong is if I say the earth is flat. That’s wrong. Or if the 
He really will do anything to win an argument, having been to the School of Hard Knocks, where he learned how to sell freezers to Eskimos and throw in a bargain 12-pack of horse burgers. But I spent four years being taught how to argue, at a noble institute of higher learning. I have a first class degree in Advanced Arguology. ‘There are two meanings of wrong, okay? There’s wrong, mistaken, and there’s wrong, raping six month old babies. ‘
‘Well, everybody would agree with that, wouldn’t they? Now you’re just being silly.’
‘So you think it’s okay for a society to look after its guinea pigs better than it looks after people who’ve fled for their lives across half a world, and lost everything on the way?’
‘Like I said, it’s a choice. Mind you, the signage is awful. And they clearly don’t understand 
‘Just like me wanting that giant spoon on the wall next to the mirror is a choice.’
Sometimes you can lose the war by winning the battle. But the scent of victory is irresistible. ‘You told me, not a month ago, that you knew about aesthetics, and in the world of aesthetics, 
He was either pretending to be asleep, or wishing he were, or both.
‘So. You have your absolute aesthetics, and I’ll have my absolute morality. I’ll let Dolly shop at that sink of 
And, thinking about it, that’s pretty much the way we keep the peace.
