When I was young we had a Christmas stocking with the dog’s name on it, inked on to the white trim with a laundry pen. On Christmas morning it would be found to contain two or perhaps three treats picked up from the pet aisle of the supermarket: nothing festive, everything edible. The dog, as I recall, was appreciative, if a little suspicious.
Holiday pet spending is of a different order these days: last year it was reported that UK shoppers spent £873m on Christmas presents for dogs and cats. A survey from last month found that 18% of Britons planned to spend more on their pet at Christmas than on their partner. While I don’t really disapprove of buying presents for pets, it’s hard to view these statistics as unalloyed good news.
We already have a weird relationship with spending at Christmas: on the one hand it’s a symptom of everything that’s wrong with our approach to the season; on the other, it’s an essential component of the retail sector’s survival. We feel guilty for spending too much, and then disappointed with ourselves for not spending enough. In an environment like that, there’s something refreshingly perverse about people upping their gift spend on animals. Faced with the obligation to prop up the economy, it’s as though we have decided to put our money where it will do the least good.
Why do we actually buy presents for pets? Seventy-seven per cent of people surveyed said they did it because they didn’t want their pet to feel left out. Whatever your position on the need to make a cat feel included at Christmas, you have to admit that unlike everyone else on your list, a pet is very easy to shop for. A dog will not complain about the colour of a new collar, or ask if you kept the receipt. Buying a Christmas present for my wife is an annual exercise in handwringing anxiety. I can get a gift any cat will love from a petrol station.
We certainly don’t seem to be expending an excess of imagination on animal presents; just money. The number one Christmas pet-gift category is food, and the top 10 includes chew toys, balls, bones, cat nip, beds and blankets. It’s true there are now £300 designer dog hats for sale, along with a Versace dog bed that will set you back almost a grand, but most people still seem to be buying the sort of thing you would have found in my dog’s stocking 50 years ago. The exception, of course, is the dog costume. We didn’t have those then.
It is said that we increasingly treat our pets as children, but really we treat our pets as reflections of ourselves. When you pick up a pet-sized Santa costume and exclaim, “My dog will love this!”, what you really mean is, “I love this, and my dog can’t talk!”
There are good reasons to buy your pets presents at Christmas: a new chew toy may keep your dog busy enough to stop it pulling a raw turkey off the worktop and running away with it; a rubber fish that flops about on its own will occupy a cat that normally spends this time of year eating tinsel and barfing it up in dark corners. But you need to give your pets these gifts early, before the damage is done. A dog present isn’t just for Christmas; it’s for the week before, and the 12 days after.
Tim Dowling is a regular Guardian contributor
