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Pets in the 60's, 70's and 80's
Charcole911
Posts: 6,353 Forum Member
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I gather pets were less pampered in these days. Do you have any memories of keeping pets, or growing up with pets from the "Stone age" :eek: 
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Charcole911
Posts: 6,353
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What I do think was different was veterinary care. We had no pet insurance, minimal visits to the vets (my parents would just wait and see if they got better on their own) and once the cats got elderly and ill the vet said they had to be put to sleep as there was nothing that could be done for them.
Going back to the days when my mum grew up (40s/50s), her mum, my nan, used to drown kittens if the cats reproduced as spaying cats wasn't a financial consideration and it was deemed the kindest thing to do if you couldn't afford to feed them.
Unfortunately the cat only lived for a few months in Ireland - she got killed by a train one night. My family was devastated, we loved that cat.
My childhood dogs were just fed human leftover food. It was only in later years that my parents bought proper dog food and those dogs lived longer lives, 14 - 16. They rarely came into the house when I was young, they slept in outbuildings but, again, our later dogs became more 'house dogs'.
Vets in our part of rural Ireland used to very much focus on farm animals and never had much small animal work. Rural Irish folk were not very sentimental about pets. Those attitudes are now changing (maybe due to the mass media age and all the animal programmes on TV?) and the small animal business is thriving.
I've always loved animals and stopped eating meat when I was a young adult despite growing up on a farm with cattle routinely going off to be slaughtered. When I was 11 I asked where Blackie had gone - he had been a gorgeous young cute calf who we children had hand fed - and didn't like what I heard
The cat was fed a mixture of tinned cat food and given a contribution of meat or fish depending on what they cooked.
The local vet they used for many years was very good although the only high-tech he had was an x-ray machine. He must have done well during his career as he lived in a big house in a very nice area. I know this as I saw his obituary in the local paper last year, he was nearly 90 when he died but retired over 20 years ago. I don't recall the cat being vaccinated, maybe it wasn't available 40 years ago (?).
she also got left in the car whilst my grandad popped back into the shop and she took the handbrake off the car and wrote his car off
we also had one called jayjay, i have a vague recollection of my grandad eating his worming tablets :rolleyes: nothing was ever clearly labled. They could be complete nightmares, especially when suzy got got out and got caught pregnant
We had cats from when I was about 5 years old, that being the late 50's throughout the 60's and to when I left home in the mid 70's. Although very much loved and looked after, there were no litter trays or cats flaps, also a very small variety of tinned cat food was available, Kitekat was the first tinned cat food I knew of and then Whiskers, other than that cats had scraps or went and killed their own....although she had to have a bit of the Sunday joint otherwise she'd sit and sulk on her chair!!
If your pet was ill then the PDSA was the ususal place you would go to.....it wasn't just for people on benefits, then, you still donated what you could afford though. Our first cat Judy was spayed and that was around 1959, and she lived until she was 11 which was a good age for a cat then. By the time we had our second family cat, things were very different, but still not as pampered like they are now.