Ask any dog lover – Lily Allen has committed the cardinal sin of pet ownership

Pet ownership is one of the weirder things we do as a species. Think about it: you trap a little goblin in your home, ply it with toys and novelty costumes until all the natural survival instincts leave its body, and then feed it until you develop mutual Stockholm syndrome. If pets didn’t already exist, you’d be called crazy for inventing them.

That being said, they do exist, and so with that ownership must come a measure of responsibility.

The intensity of that responsibility can vary according to the pet – cats pretty much look after themselves, while hamsters will spontaneously explode if you wear the wrong aftershave around them. In any case, when you invite that goblin into your home, they become yours to love and protect, whether you like it or not.

One person who seems to have missed the memo, though, is Lily Allen, who has revealed in an interview that she returned her dog to the animal shelter after it ate her children’s passports.

Speaking to Steve Jones on the Miss Me? podcast, Allen said: “I cannot tell you how much money it cost me to get everything replaced, because it was in Covid and so it was just an absolute logistical nightmare … And because the father of my children lives in England, I couldn’t take them back to see their dad for like four months, five months, because this f***ing dog had eaten the passports.”

It’s worth pointing out that while Allen isn’t exactly the musical tour de force she was back when I was in high school, her husband David Harbour is in Stranger Things and at least two Marvel movies, so using money as a justification for exiling a dog from her home doesn’t feel like the strongest defence here.

She continued: “I just couldn’t look at her. I was like, you’ve ruined my life … passports weren’t the only thing [the dog] ate… she was a very badly behaved dog and I really tried very hard with her, but it just didn’t work out and the passports were the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

If experiencing that level of personal resentment towards an animal with a brain the size of a tangerine feels a little over the top to you, that’s because it is. I don’t know what needs to be happening in your life that a poorly behaved pet is enough to “ruin” it, but I do know that taking it out on the pet isn’t much of a solution.

Did you see that video from earlier this year, of a puppy chasing its owners’ car after it was abandoned on the side of the road? It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. I’d rather watch grainy video footage of my own death than see that again.

I should disclose here: I don’t particularly like dogs. Or cats. Or the concept of pet ownership in general. If I wanted to pay too much for a small creature to stress me out and defecate in my living room, I’d just have a kid. At least they can get jobs, eventually.

But even I know that you don’t get to just change your mind once you’ve made the commitment to bring one into your family. I don’t have any pets right now, but I did grow up with them, and one thing I know is that if your pet is badly behaved, then I’m sorry, but that’s on you. You don’t get to place blame on a creature with the IQ of one of those musical birthday cards.

Pets aren’t an accessory that you can just toss aside as soon as they become inconvenient – like it or not, you’re in this thing for the long haul as soon as it steps over the boundary of your front door. If you aren’t sure about whether you’re up to the task of taking care of one, you need to figure that out before you bring it into your home.

Also, this is kind of beside the point, but I’m sort of baffled by the fact that Lily Allen would go on a podcast and openly talk about doing something so heinous. If there’s one group of people I wouldn’t want to p*** off, it’s dog people. Those guys are insane. They’re like the Swifties of animal lovers. She may as well have gone on the radio and talked about how she thinks Red is overrated. After a certain point you’re just asking for trouble.

If you’re thinking about adopting a dog, or any animal, think long and hard about whether you really want to. I certainly don’t, but apparently that makes me “jaded” and “weird”, so what do I know?

If you’re normal, and you think that a pet will bring joy to you and your family, then I say go for it – but just remember, that joy cuts both ways. You don’t get to rescind it just because you got bored, or they annoyed you, or because they ate your kids’ passports. If you’re not up to the responsibility of pet ownership, nobody is going to judge you – just so long as you don’t try to back out after the fact.