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A 2025 BBC News report told the story of a four-year-old Merseyside cat named “Ronnie” that had been shot multiple times with an air rifle. The cat’s owner said her pet was “lucky to be alive”.
The cat’s owner was quoted up to £10,000 to have the pellets removed as she revealed that her pet insurance only covered up to £7,000 of costs and Ronnie the cat also had to be put on antibiotics and undergo monitoring by vets.
Pam, the owner of the cat, said she was so upset after the incident that she cancelled a planned holiday to Spain. She added: “There was no way I was going to leave him in a cattery after that. You just love them so much, pets are like family.”
But are they really like family or are they just animals and have we created a grotesquely dysfunctional society where we slaughter the innocent unborn on an industrial scale but worry about cats shot with airguns or dogs that have been neglected?
We should of course treat animals properly and causing them to suffer cannot be justified. Equally, however, treating them as if they were human beings is certainly not justified either, but increasingly, that’s what we do.
The Merseyside cat story bears similarities to another situation that emerged several years earlier. Several national newspapers ran a story about a pet cat which had also been shot with an airgun. One breathless headline, in an otherwise sober daily paper, told how the cat was “almost killed” by the shot. The same paper went on to relate that “Nibbles was targeted in Cambuslang, South Lanarkshire, and left with a pellet lodged in its throat.”
Nibbles, perhaps as a result of the attack, was not available for comment, but luckily both the SPCA and the police were. An SPCA spokesperson claimed Nibbles was “lucky to survive” while a police source stated: “Due to the location of the pellet, Nibbles may require specialist treatment at Glasgow Vet School to have it removed but, at the moment, she is at home with her family and being kept comfortable.”
In case you think the above paragraphs were taken from the script of a comedy programme, please be assured this is not fabricated. We live in a society where injuring a cat makes headlines but aborting an unborn child does not.
On the same day that Nibbles or Ronnie were being subjected to these egregious, though fortunately not fatal attacks, there were over 700 abortions carried out across the UK – as there is every single day, of every month, of every year.
None of the newspapers, radio or television stations which so readily gave space and time to report on the injured cats, mentioned this; they never do. None of them bemoaned the fact that 700 unborn babies would never be at home with their families, “being kept comfortable”. Injuring cats makes headlines, slaughtering the unborn doesn’t.
According to the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, the average annual cost of owning a dog is currently around £2,000 per year, and this doesn’t consider how much the dog may cost to buy. The cost of keeping cats is not much different.
Research by some supermarkets found that on average pet owners spent between £400 and £500 each year on food for their pets. Other costs, including toys, treats, grooming costs and vet bills add a further £700-£800 to the bill and pet insurance can add around £300 per year to these sums. With an average life expectancy of 13 years, this means when you consider inflation and rising costs, the lifetime cost of ownership is around £26,000! It’s not cheap.
We regularly see research telling us how expensive it is to bring up a child. It almost suggests that having children and bringing them up is nothing but a massive financial millstone around parents’ necks.
By contrast, the cost of having a pet doesn’t get nearly as much attention or publicity – the figures certainly aren’t used to dissuade or discourage people from pet ownership. Similarly, with smoking, a smoker who smokes 20 cigarettes a day will cost themselves around £6,000 a year to fund their habit, that’s probably not a cost that gets nearly enough attention either.
There is a significant difference between spending money on having children, owning pets or smoking. And it is this – if everyone stopped smoking or owning a pet, our society would still exist; if people stopped having children, it wouldn’t.
Dogs Trust is the largest dog welfare charity in the UK. Its mission is, in its own words: “to bring about the day when all dogs can enjoy a happy life”. In 2024, the organisation had an income of £136 million. It was the charity formerly known as the National Canine Defence League, which in 1978 came up with the famous slogan: “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas”.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), the largest child welfare charity in the UK in 2024, had an annual income of £124 million. So, our largest dog welfare charity earns £136 million per year, while our largest child welfare charity earns £124 million.
There are 13.5 million dogs in the UK and 14.5 million children – that’s equivalent to a donation of £8.50 per child and £10 per dog. There is no doubt that, as a society we have displaced the affection, love and concern due to our fellow humans and in its place transferred it on to animals. The pet dog, who in an earlier era would have fed on the scraps from the family table, now dines on designer dog food and “enjoys” Christmas treats often at a cost greater than the amounts spent on many children living in poverty. Is this right? Is it justified?
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2418): “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons.”
There’s nothing wrong with having a pet dog or cat, it is not problematic or harmful. But is it a coincidence that as we have become increasingly concerned about animal welfare in general; taking out insurance on our pets, feeding them well, spoiling them, we have become less and less concerned about the welfare of our unborn brothers and sisters? Allowing abortion up to birth and posting out pills which bring about the bloody brutality of home abortions, in the back streets and byways of our country – exactly the situation which our vaunted abortion legislation was supposedly enacted to end.
Over the course of the next month, there will be around 20,000 abortions carried out in the UK. The chance to be born – the chance we were all given – will be violently taken away from 20,000 of our fellow citizens. We will never see them or hear them, we will never be served by them in a shop or a café, we will never be cared for or cured by them in a hospital or a clinic, we will never laugh or sing along with them as they perform in a concert hall or TV studio, we will never watch them play for their team or score for their country, win a Wimbledon final or a Nobel Prize. They will be robbed of life and we will be robbed of their contribution to our society.
What price can we put on life and how much should we give to the cause of protecting the unborn from death? We donate over £700 million a year to the National Trust to protect historic land and buildings, we donate at least the same amount to cancer research and as I mentioned, we give about £136 million a year to look after dogs. Ironically, we give some £240 million a year to the Lifeboats of the RNLI to save people from drowning, without realising that we are literally drowning in our own hypocrisy, when a cat being hit with a pellet makes news headlines, while an unborn baby being put to death doesn’t.
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