Animal war memorials in the UK

"Most of our memorials sentimentalise war. Few commemorate the horror. But now we have a new category whose purpose seems to be to trivialise it", writes the columnist picking up on a UK trend of war memorials dedicated to animals. "The emphasis given to animals' suffering in war highlights a failure to acknowledge the suffering of human beings. The tableau in Park Lane carries the justifying motto: 'They had no choice.' Nor did the civilians killed in Iraq, the millions of women raped over the centuries by soldiers, ... You would scour this country in vain for a monument to any of them. ... So what is going on? What is so appealing about these memorials to the members of the royal family who agreed to unveil them ... to the rightwing multimillionaires who financed the giant tableau? Why, when the war we started in Iraq appears to have killed hundreds of thousands of human beings, have we become obsessed by the non-human victims of conflict?"

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