by Ben Fogle
More than half of the British population keep at least one pet. In 2016, a record number of 12 million households had pets, the total pet population amounting to 58.4 million. What are the most popular pets in England? Surprisingly, fish come out on top. If you combine the indoor variety with those in garden ponds (19.9m and 17.1m respectively), you arrive at a figure of 36.1 million, which beats hands down dogs (8.5m) and cats (7.4m).
Despite reports about Britain’s ever-increasing population of elderly people, there are more pets than there are people over sixty-five years of age. Brits don’t just run with their dogs – they talk to them, watch television with them, buy them holiday gifts and have their portraits painted. Nine out of ten pet owners treat their pets as members of their family.
The extent to which pets are vital members of the family is revealed in various surveys and statistics. We spent more than £4.6 billion on our pets in 2015, an amount per pet of £79 a year (or £219 per pet if you exclude the fish). After that we get into some fascinating territory: 19 per cent of pet owners buy cars with their dog in mind; 65 per cent believe that their pet is more reliable than their partner; and 32 per cent buy their non-human companion more gifts than the other human in their lives. Amazingly, 9 per cent confess that they have created a Facebook page for their pet – and that’s just the ones who are prepared to admit it. We love our animals. And it’s not just fish, dogs, cats and horses.
Exotic pets have always been prized in England but they are increasingly popular, and the weirder the better: a Mexican red-legged tarantula; a giant African land snail; a wide-mouthed frog; pygmy hedgehogs, sloths, fire-bellied newts, a glis glis, as well as all sorts of reptiles, rodents, butterflies and birds. Articles about unusual pets are read voraciously by the public and are considered a banker by all media outlets, particularly in our summer silly season.
Examples of recent stories range from a shire horse called Lincoln who costs £10,000 a year to feed and devours twenty-four apples a day to a twelve-stone pet emu called Beaky belonging to the Newby family from Essex. The 6ft bird lives in the summerhouse in their garden and gobbles 12lb of corn each week, and 5lb of fruit and veg. Wild cat rescuer Dr Terry Moore lives on the outskirts of London with nine snow leopards, three pumas, two Amur leopards and a jaguar: ‘The animals love belly rubs, trying to sit on Terry’s lap and being read to.’
Low-maintenance yet exotic pets that are legal to own include bearded dragon lizards, chinchillas, crocodiles, piranha fish, scorpions, boa constrictors, the Madagascar hissing cockroach, the green iguana, hermit crabs, bush babies, the Southern Tamandua, the flying squirrel, the Kinkajou or flower bear, the tiny huge-eared white fox known as a Chanterelle fennec, mini donkeys, pygmy goats, axolotl (the salamander beloved of crossword setters), monkeys, Bengal cats, dwarf pigs, skunk, a cat-like carnivore known as the chestnut spotted genet, the semi-aquatic rodent called the capybara, llama, silver fox, turtle, wallaroo, hippopotamus, stick insect, and the beautiful hyacinth macaw. It is a very English fact that more than 300 people are hospitalized each year due to injuries caused by unusual pets.
Dogs of course have a special place in the hearts of the English, including mine. The average British dog owner takes 433 walks a year, covering a distance of 548 miles, which is the equivalent of going from Land’s End to John O’Groats. That’s a lot of dog walking.
Fifty per cent of dog owners admit to talking to their canine companions when alone. When not talking to our dogs, we spend an average four hours a week talking about our dogs to others. English dog owners spend an average of £400 a year on accessories, food, treats, grooming, holidays, insurance, vets’ bills and kennels. One in five dog owners celebrate their pooch’s birthday. One in five female dog owners say they would stop going out with a partner who did not like their dog.
Dogs have always loomed large in my own life. Not only did my parents meet through their dogs when my mother brought her sick golden retriever, Honey, in to see my father; but my wife Marina and I also met through our labradors Maggi and Inca while walking in the park.
Dogs have had a long working relationship with man in England, and one of the most obscure activities is hound trailing. Originating in Cumbria, it has been practised since the eighteenth century, but was only formally organized under the auspices of the Hound Trailing Association in 1906. Observers bet on which hound will be the first to complete the course, as the dogs follow a trail of paraffin and aniseed across the landscape. The trail is marked out by two people carrying wooden rags who walk together to the halfway point, then separate and continue to either end, thereby laying a thick scent for the whole course.
Senior dog races have to be completed in less than forty-five minutes. Special trails are laid for veteran racers and for maiden trail hounds. Prizes are also awarded to the dogs with the best appearance. To make sure sly competitors don’t swap dogs mid-race, all hounds have a coloured mark placed on their head; to avoid overheating, the dogs are shaved bald, giving them a most peculiar appearance.
I watched as several dozen of them waited on the start line before being given the scent and then released into the mountains. It’s a rather odd sight to see all the dogs heading off into the hills alone, a little as if by remote control. But the strangest and arguably the most English sight of all is at the finish line, when the dogs all appear on the horizon for the first time. The owner of each animal holds out a bowl of their dog’s favourite food, shaking it frantically while they holler their dog’s name.
Despite the colour coding, the hounds all look identical. And I suspect to a galloping, tired hound, all the owners look the same too. And, well, food is food at the end of the day, which leads to a comical scene in which dogs run to the wrong owner and owners grab the wrong dog. There are multiple scenes of dog swapping as animals are exchanged.
From trailing to trialling. Another quintessential English event is the sheep dog trial. Here the dog must perform a range of tasks frequently carried out on a working farm, such as fetching sheep from a distance, guiding them through gates, splitting a group of sheep in two and driving the flock into a pen. The handler controls the dog with a known set of whistled or spoken commands. The trial must be performed within a set time and each of the various tasks is marked by judges. The International Sheep Dog Society, founded in 1906, today holds the worldwide trial once every three years. Sheep dog trials can mean big money, too: in an auction in 2011, £6,300 was paid for a dog called Dewi Fan.
The TV programme One Man and His Dog ran on the BBC for twenty-four years, between 1976 and 2000. Its original presenter, Phil Drabble, worked on the show for eighteen years and the original commentator, Eric Halsall, for fourteen. They were subsequently replaced by Ray Ollerenshaw, Robin Page and Gus Darmody. The series reached the height of its popularity in the mid-1980s, getting audiences of up to eight million viewers. It ran regularly before the weekend news, but during the late 1990s it was moved to an earlier slot, much to the distress of many farmers, who could no longer watch it due to the demands of their work.
The series was axed in 2000, but due to popular demand a Christmas special was shown once a year. Clarissa Dixon Wright, the late co-presenter of the equally eccentric and very successful cookery programme Two Fat Ladies, had replaced the rather cantankerous Robin Page as presenter. I was invited to join the programme as a guest captain of the England team in 2003. We won, and I still have the winning shepherd’s crook. But more importantly I won the coveted role of presenter. The next year, broadcasting from Chatsworth, I returned as host, replacing Clarissa.
In 2006, to celebrate the anniversary of the show, the Duchess of Cornwall came along with her daughter Laura. I still have vivid memories of sitting with the Duchess and her daughter on the hay bales in the early summer Cumbrian sunshine explaining the intricacies of sheep dog trials. It really doesn’t get much more English than that. My late maternal grandfather, Dick (another great English name), was a huge fan of One Man and His Dog, and I was always sad he nev
er saw me host the show. I know he would have been proud.
We grow up on a canon of children’s books in which animals play a magical part. Examples include Peter Pan, with Nana the Newfoundland nanny hired by the Darlings to look after their children; The Wind in the Willows, about four anthropomorphized characters, Mole, Badger, Rat and Toad; Beatrix Potter’s world of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddleduck, Squirrel Nutkin, Mrs Tiggywinkle, etc; Paddington Bear; Black Beauty; Winnie-the-Pooh with Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit and Owl, and so on. From the earliest age we read about lovable creatures and how they are so integrated into our lives. Perhaps it’s no wonder that children want pets and we as a nation have so many animals living with and around us.
Safari tourism started becoming popular in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1836 William Cornwallis Harris, a notable early Victorian traveller, led an expedition purely to observe and record wildlife and landscapes. Harris established the safari style of journey, rising at first light, spending an energetic day walking before an afternoon rest, and concluding with a formal dinner and the telling of stories over drinks and tobacco. Jules Verne’s first novel Five Weeks in a Balloon was published in 1863, and was followed in 1885 by H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Both describe the journeys of English travellers ‘on safari’ and were best sellers in their day.
One of the most unusual aspects of the Victorian era was the obsession in towns and cities across England with exotic animals, largely imported from the farthest corners of the British Empire. Hippos and tigers were both common sights in England at the turn of the nineteenth century. It has been estimated that single ships sailing from Adelaide to London would carry up to 30,000 parrots to feed the Victorian obsession with the exotic pets.
Private and public zoos and natural history museums thrived during the Victorian era. Touring shows featuring exotic animals from across the world travelled across England, enthralling audiences. Many people simply bought their own animals, either from one of the 118 wild animal dealers in London or from shops in Liverpool, Bath and Bristol. People could walk into a shop and purchase anything from an elephant to a bear to a kangaroo. And the broader politics of the British Empire drove this burgeoning industry into the rest of Europe. Before the Suez Canal was built, for example, almost every ship coming from Asia or Africa touched land first in England. After its construction, Germany steadily overtook the UK in ‘the scramble for elephants’.
Perhaps the most famous story of all was of the tiger that escaped in the East End of London in 1857 and ate a boy. It was not even the first time that a tiger had been loose in that very street – one had escaped from a travelling menagerie some years earlier.
The tiger was being delivered to a shop owned by Charles Jamrach, who was at that time the pre-eminent wild animal dealer in the world. He had a network of agents all over the globe. Jamrach stocked all manner of exotic beasts, including elephants, lions, tigers, bears, tapirs and armadillos. And he claimed to be able to obtain his clients any animal they wanted through his network of agents. On at least one occasion he sourced a rhinoceros.
Contemporary accounts of his premises also speak of thousands of parrots and exotic birds packed so tightly together in cages that they were unable to move. But this particular tiger, it seems, was not content to be put on display. As it was being delivered, it put its front feet against one side of the flimsy wooden crate in which it was being transported, and its back feet against the other side. Pushing with all its strength, it managed to burst out and make off down the busy thoroughfare of St George’s Street, picking up a small boy named John Wade as it went.
Unwilling to lose his quarry, Jamrach set off after the tiger. In an extraordinarily incongruous scene, he grabbed it by the throat. His account of the event, entitled ‘My Struggle with a Tiger’, was published in the Boy’s Own Paper – an illustrated magazine which carried a mixture of factual and fictional stories – in February 1879. In it he describes what happened next:
My men had been seized with the same panic as the bystanders, but now I discovered one lurking round a corner, so I shouted to him to come with a crowbar – he fetched one and hit the tiger three tremendous blows over the eyes.
It was only now he released the boy. His jaws opened and his tongue protruded about seven inches. I thought the brute was dead or dying, and let go of him, but no sooner had I done so than he jumped up again.
In the same moment I seized the crowbar myself and gave him, with all the strength I had left, a blow over the head. He seemed to be quite cowed, and turning tail, went back towards the stables, which fortunately were open.
I drove him into the yard and, and closed the doors at once. Looking round for my tiger, I found that he had sneaked into a large empty den that stood open at the bottom of the yard.
Two of my men who had jumped onto an elephant’s box, now descended and pushed down the iron-barred siding of the door; and so my tiger was safe again under lock and key.
In spite of saving young Wade, Jamrach was sued for damages by the boy’s father and had to pay £300 – equivalent to more than £30,000 today. But he had one other consolation – he sold the animal to Wombwell’s menagerie for the the same amount, where it was exhibited as ‘The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy’.
England was a clearing house for the animals of the world and they poured in by the thousand – both alive and dead. The trade in these wild animals was unregulated – there was only the most rudimentary consciousness about the idea of endangered species. The very first animal welfare laws had been passed by this time and, although there were concerns about the extent of the fur trade and the conditions suffered by animals undergoing live export for slaughter, there was neither the systematic legislation there is today nor any international framework to protect wild animals. Demand was high, and it persisted at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. One Indian-based taxidermy company, Van Ingen & Van Ingen, stuffed roughly 43,000 tigers and leopards between 1900 and about 1950 to supply the European and Indian demand for trophies.
The beasts moved from fair to fair with the travelling menageries, they underpinned new scientific research and they sat glumly in architect-designed cages in the grounds of the most fashionable country houses. The capture, trade and display of exotic animals was one of the many ways in which the British Empire made its influence felt.
After the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the English made several improvements in methodology and skill. Much of this can be attributed to the culture of Victorian society. According to Paul Farber, a researcher at the University of Chicago, in his book The Development of Taxidermy and the History of Ornithology, the art of taxidermy was first brought into popular regard by the Victorians, who were enthralled by all tokens of exotic travel, and especially by domesticated representations of wilderness. Whether it was a glassed-in miniature rain forest on the tea table or a mounted antelope by the front door, members of the elite class relished the art as a manifestation of one’s knowledge, wealth and artistry.
The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826 by Sir Stamford Raffles with the aim of promoting the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats – and the society’s London Zoo in Regent’s Park was established.
Whipsnade Park Zoo opened on Sunday 23 May 1931, the first open zoo in Europe to be easily accessible to the visiting public. Almost 100 years after the opening of London Zoo, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell (secretary of the Royal Zoological Society from 1903 to 1935) was inspired by a visit to the Bronx Zoological Park to create a park in Britain as a conservation centre. Hall Farm, a derelict farm on the Dunstable Downs, thirty miles north of London, was purchased by the Zoological Society of London in 1926 for £480 12s 10d. The site was fenced, roads built and trees planted. The first animals arrived at the park in 1928, including two Lady Amherst’s pheasants, a golden pheasant and five red junglefowl. Others soon followed, including muntjac, llama, wombats and skunks. It was an immediate success and received ov
er 38,000 visitors on the following Monday. The brown bear enclosure is a surviving feature from the earliest days of the zoo. The collection of animals was boosted in 1932 by the purchase of a collection from a defunct travelling menagerie and some of the larger animals walked to the zoo from Dunstable station.
It still thrills me to see working horses in the centre of London. I often walk the dogs while heavy horses work the Royal Parks. The sight of shire horses mowing the grass at Kensington Palace or making hay in Hyde Park is curiously uplifting. You can also see them rolling the bracken in Richmond Park. For the past twenty-five years, Historic Royal Palaces and the Royal Parks have worked with Operation Centaur, based at Holly Lodge in Richmond Park, to help maintain their estates while promoting the conservation of iconic native breeds.
Operation Centaur works with shire horses and Cleveland bays – traditional English working breeds which are now on the rare breeds watch list, having been dramatically reduced in numbers as a result of post-war agricultural mechanization. The aim is to provide the horses with sustainable work in contemporary society to help secure them a future.
If you live in the Greater London area, you will be familiar with the incongruously exotic colours and aggressive sounds of flocks of parakeets. They can roost in one tree in huge flocks. This bird – technically a ring-necked, or rose-ringed, parakeet – is Britain’s most abundant naturalized parrot and became established in the wild in the 1970s after captive birds escaped or were released. The population is concentrated in south-east England, though sightings are often reported in other parts of Britain, and are likely to be local escapees.