My cat, Clovis, is ginger on top and white underneath, with tiger stripes like wishbones on his face. He wakes us too early and, in this house with no children, we catch ourselves saying, ‘let’s tire him out now in the hope he sleeps through the night.’ He doesn’t. His real motivation in life is to chase the cord of a towelling dressing gown. Ceramics are no longer on display (he swipes at them); flowers in vases are a thing of the past (he eats them). 

Charles Foster might well see our masochistic devotion to Clovis as part of the problem. Pets & their People is a wide-ranging and entertaining exploration of the relationship between humans and animals. It is more serious – bitter even – than its cats-at-­Christmas timing might suggest. Foster gives a stark (and very funny) account of the essential oddity that underpins the human habit of living with everything from hamsters to budgerigars, in all its inconvenience, expense and skew-whiff morality. He quotes an angry pamphlet from 1756 which denounces the fact that pet owners will lavish funds on feeding and tending a cat or dog, while doing little to ‘relieve the hunger of a man’. 

Anthropomorphism is a word insufficient to cover the financially and ecologically unsound industries – from animal bling, veterinary care and meaty chunks in gravy – that are now bound ineluctably to the lives of our pets. Foster is not unsympathetic to our love for animals: he offers plenty of evidence