I’m going to take the rather controversial point of view here, you may call me a heartless bastard. But lets get one thing straight, I give a hell of a lot of money to animal charities. I’m not talking ‘can you give just two pounds a month’, I give hundreds, sometimes thousands a year (you get good tax breaks). But one thing that has really got on my goat lately is the continued request by certain charities for donations for vet bills for dogs, or rather ‘dog’. What happens is you get some poor ancient animal thats no doubt been abused and abandoned and has ended up in some Welsh pound. It’s scheduled to die. Someone goes in from some rescue charity and drives hundreds of miles to pick up this sick animal and then bring it back to an animal sanctuary where it will get treated by a vet costing tens of thousands of pounds, where hopefully it will be adopted again. All very nobel? Well indeed. But I have a serious problem with this. That person who has driven all those miles to pick up said dog walks down the aisle of kennels where many healthy dogs are there through no fault of their own, young dogs, abandoned dogs, loving dogs who all just want a home. So old ancient dog is picked up and everyone is expected to donate for its bills. What happens to all the other dogs which only required their shots and a bit of worming? I’ll tell you. They get 20cc of sodium pentathol in the leg on the pound floor. The last thing they see in life is a strip light and some lackey holding them down. So, no, I won’t donate to the vets bills. For the cost of one dog you could have saved twenty.