Pets' birthdays

I have just read an horrendous headline in last week's The Independent. The British spent £294 MILLION last year on birthday presents for their pets. Now I have gone on and on in these columns about mumbo jumbo of various sorts. But this needs to be put into some kind of perspective. And one perspective is that that sort of money could buy outright something like 20 million acres of rainforests and other habitats.That's an area bigger than Scotland. And add to that the £900 million spent on cat food in the UK alone, and an area bigger than the rest of Britain could have been bought. That's without dogfood, and a whole host of other pet related expenditure. If we could channel one half of one half a percent of the money spent on British pets into saving forests -- just think how much we could save.

So why not drop 5p or 10p into a tin every time you feed the cat (or even 1p) and then once a year send it to the WLT to buy land?