‘It’s not normal, is it – a 25st pig traipsing around your house?” says fire and rescue crew manager Dave, his face etched with defeat. Ever since Dave’s wife Janey watched Babe, the film about an orphaned piglet adopted by a sheepdog, she’s wanted a pet pig that she could cuddle on the sofa and dress up in tutus. Seven years ago, she ordered a micro piglet online – the porcine answer to the Andrex puppy – which slowly ballooned into what it had been all along: a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. Undeterred, a year later she bought another supposedly tiny piglet from a farmer; six months on, it too was the size of a hippo. Now Janey and Dave’s downtime is mostly spent applying wet wipes to their pigs’ nether regions in the family bathroom and feeding them peanut butter with a spoon.
Pets make imbeciles of us all – this much I know from experience. As the stupidly besotted owner of a spaniel, I can frequently be found in the park at dusk, groping in the undergrowth for turds, guided only by the terrible stench and the light of my mobile phone. But if the gruesomely fascinating Secret World of Posh Pets (4 August, 8pm, ITV) is anything to go by, the idiocy is off the chart when you have money to burn.
The amount Britons spend on domestic animals has, we are told, doubled in the past decade to more than £5bn a year. Nearly half of UK households own a pet and 5% are apparently classified as “extreme humanisers”, which means their pets enjoy many of the lifestyle perks that they do. All of which is manna from heaven for TV producers, a ready-made tale of excess, dysfunction and tiny doggy shoes.
Over the past five weeks we’ve met asset manager Zayn, who thinks nothing of spunking five grand on a black savannah cat. And Brielle, happily riding a “unicorn” at her birthday party. We have boggled at a Lamborghini-driving falcon breeder, Bryn, who collects sperm by donning a special sex hat that, for reasons that remain unclear, male falcons find irresistible. We have stared aghast at Debi and Bob, whose £1.4m mansion in Kent is a playground for 13 dogs, and who organised a wedding for Honey, a teacup chihuahua, and Joey, a Chinese crested-chihuahua cross, complete with a “gourmet” dog food cake, and for which Honey, in a satin dress and a diamante-encrusted veil, arrived in a carriage drawn by a miniature pony. Thus, Debi’s £5,000 dream that Honey should look like “a doggie version of Princess Kate” became reality.
More money than sense? Undoubtedly, but there’s a subtle seam of melancholy here in which otherwise sentient adults fill human-shaped holes in their lives – whether it’s children who have grown up and moved out, or partners not yet found – with creatures that repay their indulgences by chewing their shoes and crapping on their kitchen floor. And, despite the arch narration, there’s an earnestness to the human protagonists that invites us not to point and laugh but to understand what drives them to fill their homes with giant rabbits or cry actual tears over the birth of a hedgehog.
Ultimately, Secret World of Posh Pets is less about pet ownership than the lengths people will go to in order to love and be loved. And if, for some, love means getting on your knees to scrub the undercarriage of an anus-faced pot-bellied pig, then, really, who are we to judge?
