A REPORT last year from the market research company Savanta listed the UK’s 100 most loved charities; the top two were Macmillan Cancer Support and Cancer Research UK, and next came the Dogs Trust (no apostrophe, formerly the National Canine Defence League) and the RSPCA.

A lot of confusion and misplaced assumptions attend the Great British public’s relationship to animals. It’s often claimed that animal charities get more money and attention than those directed at human beings, which is easily disproven: the Charities Aid Foundation about five years ago found less than 10 per cent of all donations went to animal charities (though the figure for money left in wills was higher, at 22 per cent).

Even so, according to Savanta, the most popular category of charity overall was animal welfare, and some are, by the standards of almost all charities, remarkably rich and well-supported.

The RSPCA, which was founded in 1824 and doesn’t operate in Scotland, had an income just shy of £131 million in 2019, down from £142 million the previous year. The NSPCC, which seeks to prevent cruelty to children rather than animals, and which wasn’t founded until 60 years after the RSPCA, brought in £118 million during the same period.

You are wrong, Andrew: Afghan animal rescuer Pen Farthing has shown us our humanity

At first sight, that looks like misplaced priorities, and selectively highlighting special cases can make this apparent tendency look even worse. For example, there was understandable outrage about a decade ago when it was revealed that a single donkey sanctuary in Devon had raised more cash in a year than the combined income of the three main charities for victims of rape, domestic violence and abuse.

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That is slightly unfair. The work of such groups isn’t confined to a few dozen donkeys living the life of Riley in a West Country field; it’s also aimed internationally at working donkeys and educating those who use them which, it could be claimed, is directed as much at poor people in developing countries as their animals.

It’s also doubtful that the British, despite the stereotype, are greater animal-lovers than our European neighbours: neither the figures on animal cruelty and abandonment nor a comparison of relevant legislation give much cause to think so. While we’re big on saving dogs, donkeys and the Dartford Warbler (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds lists its most recent annual income at £144 million), we’re not nearly so hot on, say, chickens, since we slaughter 90 million of them a month.

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I yield to no one in my fondness for a Zinger Burger, but it’s fairly obvious that poultry welfare doesn’t get the same attention as Rover and Kitty. Even when I kept hens, I admit I didn’t think of them in the same way as my cat. Cuteness is an easier sell than misery, whether human or animal.

If that’s psychologically understandable, it’s not really coherent. And it’s not only deplorable, but indefensible, to prioritise animals – or rather, the tiny subset of animals that we find especially adorable – over the lives and welfare of human beings.

Or so I thought, until the saga of Pen Farthing hit the headlines. I assumed that Mr Farthing, who in a furious tirade promised to “destroy” a special advisor to the Defence Secretary for not doing enough to get him out of Afghanistan on a chartered plane with 94 dogs and 74 cats, wouldn’t enjoy much public sympathy.

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When push came to shove, Mr Farthing left the 24 staff and dependents of his pet rescue centre there, and monopolised the time and effort of numerous officials and service personnel – at an airport, remember, where a suicide bomber had murdered at least 92 people hours before – who might instead have been doing something about the estimated 150 British citizens still stuck in the country, and the more than 1,000 Afghans and their families who had worked with Nato, and are, as a result, almost certainly on a list of Taliban targets.

All in all, the actions of this selfish, entitled, foul-mouthed moral imbecile would have inclined me to give his seat on any evacuation flight to a disease-ridden alpaca instead. But, incredibly, a huge proportion of the comments that flooded social and mainstream media coverage of this episode suggest that, for at least one (remarkably vocal) section of the British public, Mr Farthing is a second Noah.

The idea that there is a moral equivalence between saving an Afghan hound and an Afghan person might seem incredible, but in some of these comments you were more likely to read complaints that dogs were being prioritised over cats than that humans were being left to face, at best, theocratic fascism, or quite likely death.

When it comes to a choice between saving a human being or an animal, there’s no sort of Utilitarian “trolley problem” dilemma about outcomes or minimising harm. There isn’t any moral choice at all, because to believe an animal – or even a class of animals – has more value than human life is literally psychopathic.

The “psycho” part refers to the human soul (though I grant you it’s also the Greek word for a butterfly). Animals, despite Pope Francis’s confusion about whether dogs go to heaven, do not have those, though they have value as a part of creation. Traditional Christian teaching on this is clear, but so is the religion-free argument made by most philosophers, based on the fact that animals cannot make moral choices, or understand abstract notions such as justice, or transcend the material.

Chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, which you may know from its No 1 appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1965, does say that “a man hath no preeminence above a beast, for all is vanity”. But, like other pieces of wisdom attributed to Solomon (who probably didn’t write it, but gets the credit), it’s double-edged.

Like the sword with which he said he was going to divide an infant, it’s not to be taken at face value; the point Ecclesiastes, with the possible exception of Job the most superficially nihilistic bit of Scripture, bangs on about is that “all is vanity” – but in the absence of God.

If there is a God, the lesson of Ecclesiastes is that on the death of people and animals, “the spirit of man goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast goeth downward to the earth”. But even the most devoted atheist or animal rights activist could not credibly defend this shameful exercise in sentimentality and skewed moral priorities.

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