However, I am ''guide parent'', as they say these days, to one now-Canberra-based human baby and three children-with-fur, all of whom (the dogs, that is) have spent months at a time turning my lawn into a latrine while awaiting Customs clearance to follow their doting parents on their academic careers between the northern and southern hemispheres.
So, in other words, I'm a sucker for a book of this nature. I can understand why the pet food aisles keep expanding and why some of those little tins look more enticing than anything I am likely to buy for my own consumption.
Despite the front and back covers suggesting only Maori women owned or cherished pets, Nancy Swarbrick's book ranges far and wide across human/animal interactions over time.
It's a moving book, but it's no cute quickie. This is an intelligent look at human/animal interaction.
Creature Comforts is structured in an effective chronological/thematic framework. Ten chapters examine the relationships between New Zealanders and their pets. Moggies, doggies and birds dominate, but Swarbrick also includes some critters that may not immediately spring to mind.
As occasional childhood visits to a Maheno farm showed, it is easy to blur the distinction between supposed working dogs or the pet lambs that eventually kept Pukeuri hands busy. That's nothing new. Last year, I read a letter from a trans-Pacific liner passenger who naively failed to make the connection between the diminishing number of live animals in the ship's topside pens and his daily bill of fare.
And they are not all strictly pets as we would understand the meaning of that term. Nancy Swarbrick also examines working animals and farm animals in chapters such as calf cub days, a blend of local boosterism and animal love.
Photographs and paintings show the importance that settlers attached to their animals.
One chapter, ''From helpers to heroes'', looks at the role of animals in war. We used horses and donkeys as beasts of burden in war and have immortalised one of the latter in bronze at the National War Memorial. But many units and ships kept cats and dogs as mascots. Major Major, the Wellington Battalion's mascot, even has his own biography. As one poignant photograph shows, the police maintain a cemetery for their four-legged assistants.
Although Swarbrick explores our memorialisation in bronze of sheep-stealer James Mackenzie and his famous sheepdog and the so-called ''Father of Wellington'', John Plimmer, and his dog Fritz, I was surprised by the omission of fictitious pets in popular culture, Footrot Flats' Wal and ''The Dog'', Hairy Maclarey from Donaldson's Dairy etc. But maybe that's part of a follow-up volume?
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
Win a copy
The ODT has five copies of Creature Comforts, by Nancy Swarbrick (RRP$55), to give away courtesy of publisher Otago University Press.
For your chance to win a copy, email helen.speirs@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ''Creature Comforts Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, February 4.
