Sea Pets

By Alex Allen

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I know that the good people at the RSPCA won't agree, but pets are there for our entertainment. It's an unwritten rule, it does entertaining things for you, and you give it food and let it sleep in you house. For anyone that thinks that animals are living, breathing creatures which should be treated with respect, how long do you think a hamster would last living in the wild, three minutes? Let's be honest, this is a good deal for all animals which essentially serve no real purpose! By that, I mean animals which are incapable of sustaining themselves. Did you remember to feed your fish this morning for instance? No? That's because they're not entertaining! They've haven't earnt the love. Of course, if you are the owner of a pet that is entertaining, it turns out that people will actually spend literally hundreds and thousands of pounds on stupid things for their animals that they don't need.

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The week after Christmas is a strange week, people are still off work, shops are closed on random days and at obscure times. It's one of the few times in the year when I could end up at Sea Pets and not really question how it had happened too much, people go on trips just for the sake of getting out of the house, the location determined mostly by what's open. I find that pets shops always smells the same, bad. It's the kind of smell which makes me think I'm glad I never had a guinea pig. If you work in a pet shop, that's what you smell like to other people all the time. At the pub, in your house, at the supermarket, you smell like that shop - no matter how much you think your Radox shower gel has helped. There was one product called a 'cat lounger'. This was essentially an armchair for a cat. To be fair, cat lounging is a serious problem in my girlfriend's house. Her cat often wants to lounge and can't find a place to. He actually just ends up roaming endlessly, sure there's some light prowling, but it's a sad sight. This dejected, nomadic cat, wandering the corridor for eternity. The family often talk about what can be done about it, forget the credit crunch, there's trouble at home! So £39.76 seemed like a bargain price for a product that performed a service that could only be replicated by oh, I don't know, a sofa, the carpet, a blanket, really anything flat and soft. What a giant waste of time and money, forty pounds? The cat only cost thirty five pounds to begin with! What's next, CatPods? It's ridiculous, it makes no sense! We're losing Woolworths and Zavvi, and yet somehow these people are selling enough cat loungers to stay afloat. The only person who would want a cat lounger, is the sort of person who would have called their cat Colonel Meowington.

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I only wish that the cat lounger was the most ridiculous item I saw. Actually, the most frightening thing I saw was a skeleton for your fish tank. An actual, human skeleton (not a real skeleton, obviously). And because fish tanks are only so big, this skeleton was actually the size of a small child. I'm sure pet shops have problems with kids knocking on the glass of their tanks and disturbing the fish, but isn't death as the consequence a bit much? They're just kids, let's not start waving the death penalty at them just yet, we're not Texas. It just looked like a few unfortunate children had been too keen to play and had ended up meeting a sticky end at the bottom of the tank. The strange thing is, I think they were intended to be ornate. I think that the company that makes fish tank skeletons must have, at some point, sat down, had a meeting, and concluded that actually, human remains could do really well as the must have fish accessory. It just seemed about as tactful as a sticking a Steve Irwin figurine in there, unbelievable.