Good to see our friends in Rethink are celebrating the role of pets in lightening the load of mental illness - see the story and pictures of various pooches, mousers, a rat, and a hideous fish (dear to somebody though) here.
This also gives me the opportunity to post another gratuitous picture of the little friends which both soothe my furrowed brow and, in equal measure, cause me anxiety through fighting their own kind and defecating in the gardens of ours.
Each to his own. I don't like dogs much (though I did once contemplate a lurcher to catch rabbits for the pot - but isn't that technically illegal now?) and, as Shylock notes in the Merchant of Venice, there are some that are mad if they behold a cat even though it is in fact a harmless necessary cat, a description which suggests that the maligned but pitiable moneylender - or Shakespeare? - didn't know much about cats frankly.
Postscript:
Actually not illegal, a lawyer friend tells me, but it is if you go after hares - a curious discrimination.
