I’m not much of a pet person.

Never have been. Didn’t want a cat or dog, ever, when I was growing up, and now that I have children of my own, I am consistently and some might say, cold-heartedly, resisting all of their pleas for a puppy or kitten.

This is not hard. I love my children, but I don’t love pets.

I’m delighted my sister-in-law has purchased a puppy called Barney, a funny, fluffy little labracockadoodlepoo, or something, because now when my boys ask ‘canwegetadog’, I can say – you have a dog. You have Barney. He just lives in your cousin’s house.

Anyway, the point of this is that while I would never wish any harm to an animal (and I can admit that Barney is a cutie) animals do not figure too much in my life.

Pictures of cats on Facebook leave me cold. Horses freak me out. Hamsters are just weird.

But this week, two stories in the news caught my eye and they are both about animals.

One made me laugh out loud but the other is horrific, a kind of nightmarish vision of a world gone mad, populated by people who have clearly taken leave of their senses.

Apparently, according to the results of a freedom of information request by the Press Association, people across Britain are keeping an assortment of wild animals as pets – including lions, tigers, crocodiles and rattlesnakes.

Gulp.

But that’s not the worst of it. There are pumas in Cornwall, black widow spiders in Central Bedfordshire and, mind-bogglingly, 412 bison living in private fields all over the UK.

What on earth? Animal welfare experts are said to be ‘concerned’ by the findings. Concerned?! Not as concerned as I am. What if one of the wee venomous blighters or big scary cats ESCAPES?

Naturally, I scoured the list to see exactly what my neighbours might be harbouring, but apart from the odd crocodile and venomous lizard in North Lanarkshire, Scotland didn’t figure much on the list.

That might be because we are unwilling to fork out hefty license fees for exotic pets or because we prefer not to have things in our homes THAT CAN KILL US.

Anyway, the other story I mentioned is much less terrifying. It’s about a cat called Norma Jean who went missing from her Torquay home only to turn up NINE years later and 450 miles away in East Kilbride.

(It's not known how the cat travelled to Scotland or what happened to her in the intervening years, say the newspapers, hinting that there might be more to Norma Jean than meets the eye. Did she plan the whole thing? Has she been evading capture deliberately for almost a decade? Is she really a master-criminal in disguise?)

Coincidentally, Norma Jean’s owner was on holiday in Scotland when her cat was discovered, so the two could be reunited right away before heading back down south.

It’s lovely for the owner, of course, but I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Norma Jean, who’s probably in the back of a car bound for Torquay thinking, 'Rats! All that effort, and I’m heading back where I started….'