Geraldine Bedell: Don't expect me to keep faith with a goldfish

Too many people have a throwaway attitude to animals, the RSPCA's chief inspector said yesterday. He was commenting on two recent reports: the first, from the RSPCA itself, revealed that the charity receives a report of animal cruelty every 19 seconds. The other, from Manchester Metropolitan University, suggested that despite our self-image as a nation of animal lovers, little boys are not merely pulling the wings off flies, but strangling ducks and juggling mice.

Dismaying as this is, it shouldn't really come as a surprise. We have a throwaway attitude to everything else, so why not pets? We inhabit an upgrade culture, in which we are always on the lookout for a better lifestyle. When women get a bit old and flabby, their husbands often get rid of them. It's the same with the cat.

My parents kept everything for ages. Our hairdrier weighed about six pounds and was very good for toning your triceps but useless for drying hair. We had it about 30 years. Our house, by contrast, is full of things that aren't going to be around for long: computers, printers, televisions, set-top boxes. Telephones used to be like furniture – one in the hall, been there for ever. My daughter is already on her third mobile.

Come to think of it, furniture used to be like furniture. It didn't matter that your décor revealed the decade you got married; you lived with it happily. Now, if you can't imagine it featuring in Elle Decoration, it's probably time to get rid of it. The sofa has to suit your lifestyle and, obviously, your lifestyle has to keep changing, because what else is the point of it?

No item, however big, is immune to the discard mentality. Don't like your garden? Tune in to Planet Patio and start again. In our recent local elections, the most pressing issue turned out to be the fact that you can't get a parking space in the street because they're all taken up with abandoned vehicles. People have got bored with mending them, presumably, just as they've got bored with taking the dog to the vet.

"No one wants to be good any more, they want to be cool," argue Dick Pountain and David Robins in their recent book, Cool Rules. So too bad for terrapins if they are no longer the new black. The RSPCA should wake up to the fact that we really don't regard responsibility as very important nowadays. The Kyoto Protocol? Just too much effort.

We can't even hang on to our emotions, so why should we be expected to keep faith with goldfish? Grief over Princess Diana, fury over petrol prices, paedophile terror – these are some of the things that have preoccupied us in the recent past. And now they all look so last season.

Paradoxically, one reason we're always upgrading is that we have such a dim sense of the future. No one can see ahead much more than five years; we have lost faith in progress. We call it change instead, and brace ourselves against it. And for that, we want as few encumbrances as possible.

Computer scientists are warning that, in the future, our era will be seen as a dark age. Already, Nasa has lost its first 20 years of data: even if it could be decoded, the magnetic tape on which it was stored has decayed. This should concern us, but so should the fate of the Tibetan antelope, shot to make shahtoosh shawls. And neither does, because we just can't see that far ahead.

The faster we go, helped along by express checkouts and remote controls and a host of other time-saving devices, the more, paradoxically, our time horizon seems to contract. Casting off careers and spouses and pets, we're evidently trying to get somewhere; we just don't know where it is.

Our children can, if we let them, blow up toads with straws. We can, if we wish, arrange to get rid of the great apes in Africa. Our history has been a process of trying to master nature, in which we've finally taken control. And now we don't know what to do with it.

Gbedell@lineone.net