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Good Morning The theft of pets is to become a criminal offence. Up to now, if a dog was stolen, it was judged to be theft of property and was valued accordingly. It will now become ‘abduction’. For those whose loved pets have been snatched in the pandemic to feed the demand for puppies or kittens, this will no doubt be welcome. It affirms what many already know – that animals are sentient beings with emotional intelligence, capable of feeling fear and loss. Hearing of this legal change brought to my mind the contradictions in our attitudes to animals. Advertising and social media play remorselessly on human closeness to animals by humanising them. Almost all of the recently announced Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, wonderful as they are, project human emotions on animals – the laughing seal, the singing baboon, an owl with a hangover. When I was a child and our blue budgie Joey repeated our words, we humanized him. And children’s TV focusses on animals that talk and feel like we do. Indeed children learn about their own emotions as a result – the fearful as well as the joyful. Fictitious animals can become projections of our own psyches. The truth of the animal world is different. Aleksandr Orlov, the TV meerkat, may have thousands of fans on social media but living meerkats in the wild could be extinct in 50 years because of loss of habitat. Many other animals will share the same fate. As entertaining as it is, it’s quite possible that making animals into little humans in film and social media could distract from the challenges we face concerning biodiversity. Christianity has been accused of playing into the exploitation of animals because there are several biblical verses that stress human control over the animal world. Yet this is not the whole story. There is the dove that brings a sprig of vegetation to Noah and the animals that are often seen surrounding St Francis. Here animals are the companions of humans, who co-exist with us interdependently. They are not mini-humans simply to be used as foils of human emotions. For many pet owners, they are a central part of the family. Animals are sentient beings and need protection from human greed and cruelty.