Equating our duty to our animals, pets or livestock, with our duty to our fellow human beings, is, to my mind, a most unhealthy thing, and attributing human emotions and higher feelings to animals is just plain wrongheaded.

How can anyone compare a bitch’s fleeting reaction to the re-homing of her five puppies to the reaction of a human mother to the loss of all her children? It’s just too ridiculous. Some owners actually think more of their animals than they do of humans.

I was once called to see a horse that had been hit by a car. This was in the days before mobile phones and, when I called my office from a public phone box, the receptionist told me that the callers had been ringing every 5 minutes.

When I arrived at the scene of the accident there were five people (a family of tourists) gathered around the horse which was busily cropping grass by the roadside and which had a small cut on its chest, the only damage. It also had a saddle on it so I asked who had been riding it.

That was when they pointed to a young boy who was sitting in the ditch on his own about fifty yards away, his leg at a strange angle, obviously broken. When I asked if the doctor or ambulance was coming, it transpired that they had been so worried about the ‘poor horse’ that nobody had thought of the boy.

They were not at all happy when I immediately turned my attention to the boy but my thunderous expression didn’t allow for any complaints. I asked a passerby to call for an ambulance and only after the boy had been sent safely on his way to hospital did I insert the two simple sutures that the wounded horse required.

Excuse the spelling mistakes, I was still half asleep :)

My dogs are a small breed and their only interests are playing, cuddles, sleeping and food. Not a vicious bone in their bodies.

But I’ll admit that a dog is a lot more convenient and cheaper, though on the downside it provides no services.

P.S. If a burglar is able to enter your house with your dogs, plural, present, then there is something seriously wrong with the way you’ve raised your dogs.

A complete non sequitur in several respects. Please see beneath.

1. Not all dogs are friendly. Some breeds of working dog – like mastiffs – are specifically bred to be unfriendly. Others, like Chihuahuas, are just that way. Others just have an unfriendly temperament, full stop.

2. Whether dogs are friendly or unfriendly is irrelevant to the issue of whether the state prosthetics clinic should be making prosthetic limbs for people’s pet dogs.

3. The friendliness of dogs is also irrelevant to the issue of whether their owners should have prosthetic limbs made for them instead of doing the decent thing and having them put down. Some people choose to prolong the lives of their dogs beyond what is comfortable for the dog because they are only considering their own wishes.

Sorry Ms CG I do not agree at all with you It seems that after keeping dogs for 30 years you havrn’t learnt much about the friendliness of these creatures

People who grew up in houses where there were habitually dogs or even cats don’t dress them up in petticoats and talk to them like babies.

Another problem is never having had children, so those maternal instincts come washing out over the animals. That’s why ‘cat ladies’ are generally childless. The spinster with 10 cats is not a cliché for nothing.