1 week Ago By Evening Standard
So, tough one: which gives you greater life satisfaction, your spouse or your cat/dog? More to the point, is your dog/cat worth as much to your happiness as an extra £70,000? Ooh, even tougher. It was interesting, incidentally, that in the new film with Ralph Fiennes, The Return, about Odysseus coming back home from Troy, we see that his faithful hunting dog, Argos, literally on his last legs, recognises him before anyone else, including wife Penelope (Juliet Binoche). That tells you something, no? It also reminds us of the fundamental problem with the pet: it dies quite a bit sooner than the spouse.
Of course, the ideal is both-and: spouse plus dog/cat. I refer you to 101 Dalmatians, the premise of which is that Pongo and Perdita, the dalmatians in question, actually brought their owners together (very clever: by wrapping their leads round each other, so the two humans were brought into unexpected physical proximity) and the life satisfaction of the owners, already bolstered by a dog, was further enhanced by a happy marriage. Also read: Is your dog common? The canine class system just got real And indeed for many married dog-owners I know, the dog is a joint preoccupation, a shared responsibility, a genial member of the family (this may be not true if you have a Pekingese) who generates goodwill all round.
I would go further: if you value your dog or cat and you are considering the merits of a potential life partner, don’t even consider someone who flinches when the cat jumps on them, or the dog puts its head on their lap...
it’s not worth it. Of course the question is dodgy, like so much of the stuff generated by economists assessing life satisfaction. Based on data from 2,500 British households the authors of a study for the journal Social Indicators compared the increase in satisfaction registered by pet owners – between three to four points on a scale of one to seven – to that of having a spouse, which is similar.
The same measure suggested that the pet generated a similar increase in life satisfaction as an increase in annual income of £70,000 a year. One of the authors, Dr Adelina Gschwandtner, observed, “Given that pets are considered by many as best friends and family members, these values appear to be plausible”. If you say so, Dr Adelina.
I have had the opportunity to measure the increase in my life satisfaction since my daughter acquired a cat just over a year ago . So very far from equating to a larger salary, the creature has cost quite a lot of money, what with one thing and another. But the puss has, I think, made us all nicer.
My daughter lavishes affection on him which he reciprocates by wrapping himself round her neck at night, and what could be more agreeable? My son is all over him. My husband was opposed to the cat from the outset but since then has declared that he is the one member of the household who gives no trouble, cleans up after himself and is invariably nice to him. I just like animals and me and puss get on just fine.
When I thought he was going to die (after the stupid animal swallowed yards of thread) I wept bitterly. The trouble only arises, I’d say, if the pet is a child substitute. Think Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer who left quite a chunk of his sizeable fortune to his celebrated cat, Choupette (who has now acquired a playmate, a stray rescued from a bin in Guadeloupe).
That rather worrying phenomenon is very much in evidence in London, with terrifying dog boutiques selling costumes for every occasion that cost as much as a child princess outfit (glittery swimsuits was the look in the last one I passed); scarier still are the dog prams in which you can actually wheel your pets around. This is bad for society at a time of declining birth rates and bad for the dog: what the creature wants is to go for an actual walk and sniff other dogs’ bottoms and lamp-posts. Being wheeled around in fetching knitwear is creepy, wasteful and warped in treating dogs like babies.
So if the pet isn’t seen as a competitor for human affection but an adjunct to it, then I buy the notion that it bolsters life satisfaction. But as much as an extra £70,000 a year? Don’t be silly. Some of us have creditors to pay.
But with that amount you could pay the cat bills too. Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist.
