BAN THE GREYHOUND. THEN WHAT, THE GOLDFISH?

THEY DON’T HATE CRUELTY. THEY HATE OTHER PEOPLE ENJOYING THEMSELVES

They’ve done it. Wales, that magnificent land of hymn books, drizzle and publicly funded disapproval, has decided that the great emergency of our time is a fast dog in a coloured vest. The Senedd has voted to ban greyhound racing, with the ban due to come in sometime between April 2027 and April 2030, and there is only one track in Wales anyway. Which tells you everything. This is not some grand clash of civilisation and barbarism. It is a political class, unable to mend a road or run a railway, locating one shabby, unfashionable pastime and beating it to death with a rolled-up leaflet about compassion.

And let’s stop pretending these people are mainly upset by suffering. They are not. They are upset by the sight of other people enjoying themselves in an unfashionable way. That is the key to the whole business. They don’t object to animals being owned, bred, managed, trained, displayed, pampered, infantilised, accessorised and emotionally blackmailed into family life. If they did, half the pet trade would be hauled before a tribunal by lunchtime. What they object to is the wrong sort of people having the wrong sort of fun in the wrong sort of postcode. A dog track offends them because it is noisy, ordinary, faintly grubby and not approved by a woman called Arabella who describes herself as a “canine wellness advocate”. It involves betting slips, bacon rolls, floodlights and men who know how to mend things. It has all the elegance of a pint glass in a car park. And therefore it must be evil. Meanwhile, a cockapoo bred to match the curtains, dressed in waxed cotton and referred to as “our little prince”, is somehow an emblem of tenderness rather than a furry hostage with a personalised bowl.

That is modern morality in a nutshell. A coarse pleasure enjoyed by common people is vice. A ridiculous pleasure enjoyed by the affluent is care.

IF A RACING DOG IS A SCANDAL, WHAT EXACTLY IS A PUG?

Because once you look at the argument for more than 11 seconds, it does rather begin to eat the furniture. If it is wicked to breed and handle dogs for human entertainment in circumstances where harm may occur, then I’m afraid the dock will need extending all the way to the nation’s living rooms. The Labrador is not a “member of the family”. He is an inmate with Stockholm syndrome and a tennis-ball addiction. The French bulldog is not adorable. It is a veterinary invoice with eyebrows. The cockapoo is not your child. It is a kidnapped mop. The Persian cat draped across a radiator like an unemployed vizier is not “living her best life”; she is under indefinite house arrest with occasional tuna.

And here we come to the marvellous hypocrisy of the whole pet-industrial complex. The RSPCA says euthanasia is a last resort and only done in its care on veterinary advice or where legally required. Admirable. Yet its 2024 Kindness Index also found that 1% nationally said they had put a pet to sleep because of financial pressures, rising to 3% in London. So this country, which now talks about dogs as if they were a blend of infant, therapist and minor aristocrat, also contains plenty of people buying animals they cannot afford when life goes wrong. Compassion, in modern Britain, often turns out to be a very expensive mood.

And the same broad pet world gives us abandoned rabbits after Easter, dogs bred with faces like collapsed soufflés, cats kept indoors and called “free spirits”, and owners who spend more on salmon-flavoured chews than they do on books. But none of that gets the same moral thunder because it is wrapped in the approved language of love. The great trick is simple: if you put cruelty in a cashmere jumper and call it parenting, it becomes wholesome.

WALES HAS FIRED THE STARTING PISTOL. SCOTLAND IS LACING UP

Which brings us to Scotland, where the Parliament is, as of today, taking its final Stage 3 debate on the Greyhound Racing (Offences) (Scotland) Bill. And in a delightful touch of Celtic consistency, the Scottish bill also leaves room for the same sort of bureaucratic absurdity: racing a greyhound on a track in Scotland would be criminalised, but keeping or kennelling a greyhound in Scotland, training it there, and taking it to England to race would remain lawful. In other words, the dog becomes immoral only when it crosses the wrong bit of gravel.

This is what anti-animal-sport politics has become. Not a serious effort to create one coherent standard for animal welfare, but a travelling pageant of selective disgust. Wales goes for greyhounds. Scotland has already tightened its hunting-with-dogs law and banned snares, and now greyhound racing gets its turn on the scaffold too. The logic is always the same: identify an activity with bad optics, denounce it in the language of moral revelation, and leave untouched all the prettier absurdities in which respectable people indulge.

So what do the Welsh whingers go for next? Goldfish, because bowls are carceral? Border collies, because fetching a stick is unpaid labour? Children with hamster cages? The village fete, because a terrier once looked stressed near the coconut shy? Once politics becomes a competition in finding ever more microscopic sources of public wickedness, there is no natural stopping point. There is only the next prohibition, the next slogan, the next damp little burst of legislative self-love.

And that is why this is so funny. The same state that cannot organise itself out of a paper bag suddenly becomes Napoleon when there is an old pastime to ban. It cannot produce growth, competence or punctual trains, but by God it can turn up with a halo and close a dog track. Because that is easy. Banning a thing is much simpler than governing a country. It is politics for people who prefer gestures to results and disapproval to thought.

Nobody sensible is saying welfare does not matter. It plainly does. The point is that if these people were serious, they would apply one standard across breeding, ownership, transport, training, abandonment and pet fashion. They would examine the sentimental pet economy with the same fury they reserve for the race track. They would ask why one dog in a numbered vest is a scandal while another suffocating gently in a knitted jumper is an accessory.

But they won’t, because that would require consistency, and consistency would lead them somewhere appalling: to the pet shop, the breeder, the cat flap and the middle-class sofa. It would require them to admit that they do not, in fact, simply hate cruelty. They hate other people’s pleasures. Especially when those pleasures are loud, common, unapproved and enjoyed without a podcast explaining why. So the greyhound goes under the bus, the cockapoo gets a biscuit, and the Welsh political class gets to parade around in the reflective vest of righteousness. Scotland, meanwhile, appears determined to join the same parade, clutching its own whistle and clipboard.

At this rate the only legal animal in Britain will be a rescue tortoise named Cedric, living alone with a vegan barrister in Morningside and doing absolutely nothing that might look fun.