Matt Prior: Car designers need to learn from dogs

I’ll tell you who get an easy ride: dogs. And cats, for that matter. They have things far too easy, given how bad they are for the world.

For a start, when they’re not eating your slippers, dogs eat loads of meat. Cats do too when they’re not after next door’s budgie. And consuming meat, you probably will have read, is bad. Animal farming contributes to CO2 or equivalent emissions and, in some countries, to deforestation. Less meat and more plants is the uncontroversial current thinking.

Then there’s what these animals are doing when they’re not eating. Partly breathing out, which is only marginally antisocial in itself compared with the defecating. Oh, the defecating. Depending on when and where they’re doing it, that’s much worse.

The bags that most pet owners use to collect dog mess are very much a single-use plastic – you would hope. Cat litter bags likewise.

Then there’s the uncleared faeces, whether it’s because a dog has a bad owner or because your neighbour’s cat has left you something on your garden path that ends up on your shoes. Awful behaviour.

Worse still, it’s not like dogs and cats are useful. My central heating emits CO2, so does my car and so do my children, but at least they’ve got a purpose in furthering the human condition. Which, if you think that’s important (and I do), means we should probably keep them around.

Those few with medical roles aside, pets have no discernible value. You don’t need them to get to work or to heat your food, they don’t pay the bills and they’re not going to cure hay fever. They just make their owners feel a bit better. That’s it. That’s all they do. Basically, they’re destructive yet pretty much pointless.