Alarming news from the pet shop. If current trends continue, then at some point in 2007 more families in Britain will own a fish than will own a dog.

Experts suggest this is because of changing lifestyles: children prefer virtual dogs on the computer, and working parents don’t want to leave a real dog at home all day, in case it eats the blender and ruins the Fired Earth natural organic carpet, which cost £47.50 a yard.

Rubbish. We read last week about a Scottish hill farmer who suffered a stroke while out in the glens, and was saved from certain death by his faithful collie dogs who snuggled up with the stricken chap to keep him warm, and then ran around barking when they saw the search and rescue helicopter circling nearby.

This would not have happened if he’d been up there with Shep and Rover, his trusty sheep-fish.

And when you hear a noise in your house at 3am you are entitled to feel frightened if all you have downstairs is a brace of carp. Whereas if you have a huge dog with big spiky teeth, you can roll over and go back to sleep. Dogs bring peace of mind, then, whether you are being burgled or if you’ve had a stroke.

Nevertheless, between 1985 and 2004, dog ownership in Britain fell by 26% and now, fewer than one in five households has one.

I have three. There’s a mother, a quiet and wise old thing, and a daughter, who’s stupid and yellow and who spends half of her time at the local rugby club, eating whatever she can find in their dustbins. And the other half bringing it all back over my organic natural flooring.

She swallowed some slug pellets when she was younger and after a £740 stay at the vet’s emerged as a cabbage patch dog. I feel sure that if I were to have a stroke while on the moors, she would eat me. And then regurgitate my wallet through a burglar’s letter box.

Despite this, and the dog-logs they leave in the yard, and the incessant barking, and the smell, I find it comforting to have dogs around the place, so when my daughter said she’d like a new one for her birthday, obviously I said yes.

Things, however, have changed. Not long ago, you bought a dog for 40p, taught it to sit and fed it a tin of diced horse once a day.

Not any more. Because now, in addition to the usual array of normal dogs, there are all sorts of hybrids, usually with a poodle in the mix somewhere. I don’t know why. Poodles are horrid, vicious things. But anyway, you can have a cockerpoo or a pekeapoo or the one chosen by Tiger Woods, Graham Norton and my daughter, a labradoodle.

Do you have any idea how much such a thing costs? Go on, take a guess. Nope: you’re miles off because the price of what is basically a mongrel is £950. And I’m sorry but how can something discovered accidentally in Australia possibly be worth more than a 1991 BMW?

Of course, it arrived as cute as cute could be but, alarmingly, within 15 minutes had become the size of a small mule. Now, eight weeks down the line, it has to duck when it comes through the door, and it doesn’t chew my wellies, as you’d expect from a puppy; it swallows them whole. Some people think we may have accidentally bought a poodlephant.

But no. Stroke it and you quickly realise that what we’ve actually got is a massive bath mat draped over a skeleton. This is the world’s first meat-free dog. When he’s wet, he completely disappears. It’s spooky.

He is also, I’m afraid, the subject of some bitter controversy in dogdom. Both the poodle owners’ club and the labrador society — normally sworn enemies I presume — have put out statements saying that the labradoodle is a wicked piece of interracial designer dog experimentation built only to quench the thirst of ungodly media luvvies. They wonder what disease and madness may result.

Labradoodle owners therefore have been driven onto the web, arranging secret dogging locations where they can dog quietly, away from armed vigilante groups of labradors and poodles.

It’s terrible. We’re now on a Kennel Club blacklist, we’ve had to tune the house to accommodate our labracow, my wellies have been eaten and we’re £950 worse off.

And this is just the start. Because if you’ve spent that much on a dog, then it’s wise to get it insured, and they will insist that in addition to the collar it has a microchip inserted in its skin, so it can be tracked by satellite. And this, it turns out, annoyingly, cannot be inserted by an electrician. You’ve got to get a vet, which costs another million pounds.

I haven’t finished yet. You’ve also got to factor in the fact that designer children’s designer dogs like designer food, which is made from panda bear ears and the lightly fried scrotum of a fin whale, and they need vitamin supplements and holistic liver oil from a cod. And a fully machine washable bed, made from myrrh.

That’s why the fish is about to overtake the dog as Britain’s number one pet, because these days running a dog is more complicated and more expensive than running a nuclear power station. And of course when a dog dies, you can’t really flush it down the lavatory.

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