It's looking like it's going to be a shaky year for collective sanity, if recent news is anything to go by. We have the batty examples of the owners of a porky pooch being taken to court by the RSPCA and babies being loaned out to prospective teenage parents in the name of public entertainment for the TV programme 'Baby Borrowers'. The country has gone quite mad!
Who really cares if a dog gets overweight when obesity is such a serious epidemic among children? (Indeed, this week, social services were considering taking Connor McCreaddie of Wallsend into care, because the eight-year-old weighs 14 stone.) Someone needs to put things in perspective here. On a social level, why do we have a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and merely a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children?
Both dogs and children are natural gobblers, programmed by evolution to tuck in when rare (in the natural habitat) and attractive high-energy food like fats and sugars become available. To prevent this, we have to work against a survival trait that paid off for millennia, compared to which logic is a very recent invention. This same logic suggests that if a chubby dog merits the full weight of the law, then perhaps we should do the same for obese (equally helpless) children, and prosecute parents for gratuitous cruelty. Imagine how filled up the courts would get, let alone what a waste of time it would be. And yet children are put at huge risk by the same sort of accidental (in the sense of non-conscious) overfeeding that occurs for many luckless pets.
But the risk of becoming porky pales in comparison with the potential psychological harm done to babies separated from their parents. Although, if the parents could not work that out for themselves, then perhaps these poor mites would be better off elsewhere. I would lose my job if I learned of someone handing their baby over to unknown teenagers and failed to alert child protection services.
I am fortunate in not having digital TV and did not see 'Baby Borrowers', but the idea is enough to send shivers down the spine. So we have reached the point where someone can blithely enlist babies as a prop in an attempt to attract viewers - using another as a means to an end is fundamentally unethical and I would trust philosopher Immanuel Kant over this kind of cant anytime.
Robin Balbernie is a consultant child psychotherapist based in Gloucestershire
