The RSPCA has reported a 24% increase in the number of people convicted for animal cruelty last year. Convictions for cruelty to dogs were up by more than a third. There was a 42% rise in the number of custodial sentences. Convictions for cruelty to horses leapt by 33% in 2006, and a further 13% in 2007. If the figures upset you, then whatever you do, don't look at the pictures. The stories are awful: one dog so thin his breed could not be identified; a staffordshire bull terrier whose ears had been cut off to make her look tougher; a cat kicked to death for having muddy paws; horses tethered without water; scores of rats kept together in tiny cages. One collie cross with multiple stab wounds is a gruesome, outrageous stain on a nation that prides itself on how much it cares for dogs.
So what has gone wrong? Tim Wass, chief officer of the RSPCA inspectorate, says: "These animals are the helpless victims of our affluent, throwaway society." Is that what has happened? Have we really become crueller, as our priorities get more skewed, as our values are endlessly renegotiated? Because if that is really true, then things are very bad indeed. If this is as it looks, if we have all been brutalised by our own wealth, then life is worse for all of us. It does not matter whether you are a dog lover or not.
In fact, Becky Hawkes, also from the RSPCA, modifies this slightly. She points out that the figures do reflect a growing failure to care for our pets, but they are also due to the Animal Welfare Act, passed last spring, which dramatically improved prospects for abused animals. Before this act, an animal had to have already suffered before an offence was considered to have been committed. In other words, all the RSPCA could do, in a case where an animal wasn't being fed properly, for instance, was issue advice to the owner. After a period of time, they could return, and give more advice. Before an officer could prosecute, the animal had to be pretty much on the point of death. "It was obviously very depressing for the officers involved, whose whole aim was prevention," Hawkes says with feeling.
The change in the law means that owners can now be prosecuted at a much earlier stage, which of course has increased the number of convictions. The statistics relating to horses can throw you off the scent a bit, here. The classic offences with horses are not the kind of sadism you encounter with dogs and cats; rather, they are acts of negligence, such as tethering a horse in a place where it can't reach its food or water, or on a bank where it might fall over. The major leap in convictions for cruelty to horses was last year, before the act came into force - so it is complicated: neither entirely legislative nor conclusively social. But then, the equine numbers are very small, even in the highest year they amount to only 119 cases. Furthermore, as Hawkes points out, when your sample is that small, one negligent owner with 10 animals can really spike the figures.
The case with dogs and cats is different, and the figures are depressingly high. There were 137,245 investigations for cruelty in 2007. Some of these cases turned out to be essentially failures of planning, turned into disasters by overall incompetence - people don't realise how their mice are going to breed, so they start with five and, before they know it, have 200. Rabbits are a particular problem, because people think of them as solitary creatures, who will be happy in small cages and can easily be tended by children. In fact, they are high-maintenance, highly sociable animals, who need other rabbits and loads of space. It is possible, I suppose, that we have all become used to buying treats and diversions that have been very precisely tailored to our needs, so nobody is expecting an animal - of all the obvious, age-old playthings - to be so totally ill-suited to most lifestyles and most households. This would be a pretty hard thing to measure, however, and is too woolly a concept to be socially useful even if it were true.
More ominous and more arresting are the cases of torture, and this is not simply because they make you flinch. It is said that, observed in children, cruelty to animals presages personality disorders in later life. This was first remarked on after research conducted in prison populations in the 80s, and originally associated with anti-social personality disorder. Further research showed a striking parallel between animal cruelty in childhood and all personality disorders in adulthood.
RSPCA figures noting a surge in animal cruelty, however, would not necessarily tally with a rise in crime, since, as forensic psychologist Philipa Lowe points out, "This is behaviour in childhood; you would expect people with these personality disorders to have graduated onto crimes against the person, once they reached adulthood. Children are very limited in scope as to who they can abuse, it has to be either animals or other children."
When you talk about animal cruelty from adults, in other words, you're dealing with a different kind of criminality - where in a child it might suggest a nascent psychopath, in an adult, it is more indicative of petty, profitless criminality (though of course it doesn't look petty when you see it close up). It is interesting that the only other strand of crime that has gone up, in the past couple of years, against a backdrop of impressive, in some areas staggering crime reduction, is vandalism (up by 10%). Crimes against the person - violent crimes - are always associated with times of affluence (too much booze); crimes against property spike in times of poverty (for obvious reasons); we seem to be inhabiting a twilight time, neither rich nor poor, where the abiding criminal model is a cowardly destructiveness.
Looking at offences more specifically, though, some of are demonstrably attributable to changes in perceptions of status and identity. Hawkes argues that the most obviously "modern" abuses are not necessarily the ones that are on the rise. "There are trends that are of concern to us, such as people filming cruelty on mobile phones. But that's not to say that the behaviour didn't happen before - it just wasn't recorded before. And this is very quickly detectable, as well, because as soon as it gets out of the very small circle of people directly involved, we tend to find out about it."
Much more of a concern is that dog fighting does seem to be on the rise again, and that its nature has changed. "It used to be an activity for people who were very into dog fighting, who prided themselves on having the most macho dog, coming from a strong lineage of champions, you know, the champion of champions. There was a hard core of about 100 people involved in this country, it was very underground, and it tended to be people involved in other criminal activities as well."
That picture - which sounds like bull fighting, only illegal, and with dogs - has been replaced by a more chaotic cruelty. "Now we're seeing more hard kids on street corners, using their hard-looking dog to intimidate people. This is predominantly in urban areas, among young people. There seems to be an increase on that level, where maybe rival gangs are having their dogs fight. It's less structured, certainly."
The abiding message is that people are getting dogs for the wrong reasons - in this case, to assert a hyper-masculinity. There's also a rise in women buying toy dogs, to assert a Paris-Hilton hyper-femininity. It would be funny if it weren't really stupid, and if there wasn't some poor creature at the bottom of it all, not being looked after properly. Hawkes continues: "People look at toy dogs in magazines and think 'that looks cute, that would look nice in my handbag too'. Whereas instead they should think, 'Can I care for this animal properly? Is it the right animal for the lifestyle I lead? Can I afford to look after it, can I afford vets bills?' Dogs simply should not be used as symbols of macho pride or hyper-femininity. They're animals, they're sentient beings that need care."
This does seem to return us to the question of whether we have become more "throwaway", or at least, more idiotic. The root of all this is that you need to externalise your identity, specifically your sexual identity, announce and parade its vigour - and what could be more of an announcement, more of a parade, than an actual creature that lives and breathes and embodies masculine or feminine tropes? Of course, this has been the case since portraiture was invented, but the symbolism of dogs in modern culture seems to be unusually dumb and laid on with a trowel. In Heat and similar magazines, girls dressed in pink ponce about with teeny white dogs, and this is supposed to be an ironic pastiche of femininity, but Paris Hilton doesn't actually look ironic at all, she looks like a five-year-old. I think macho-dog imagery is a bit more nuanced (I'm thinking of Mike Skinner's staffie in the video for Dry Your Eyes), but that is probably just because I prefer Staffordshire bull terriers to poppy-eyed fluff balls.
It all seems very childish and hamfisted, but who is to say whether the immaturity is from the celebrity herself or himself, or the person who seeks to emulate? The meaningful distinction is that the celebrity is incredibly rich, so even if you never see Paris or Britney with the same lapdog twice, you can at least be assured that someone, somewhere is looking after it. In real life, these creatures are really pricey. No normal person with a regular or even high income can afford to be as pet-promiscuous as Britney Spears. At least if you copy her hair-colour schedule and don't look after it, all you end up with is incredibly ugly roots.
There has been no significant increase in cruelty to farm animals, though there was one case of a shepherd kicking a sheep to death, which I think is principally an indictment of this country's career advice services. In the end, our relationship with pets is not in crisis. Most people who have dogs still treat them like little kings. Ninety-two per cent of RSPCA investigations are satisfactorily resolved, with the miscreant heeding advice or rehoming the animal. We haven't, en masse, become psychotic. But there is a problem with people buying pets and having unrealistic expectations. They aren't accessories; however mean they look, they probably won't fight on demand, they certainly won't attack to order; they will never learn to clean up after themselves, their paws will always smell. But crucially, where it is about status, a dog (never mind a cat) will not improve your standing in the world. Not at all. Anyone who is after that would be better off buying a scarf.