Tabitha Twitchit, you'll remember, was annoyed when she found her kittens Moppet, Mittens and Tom had lost their clothes when they were meant to be waiting quietly in the garden while their mother made toast for visitors coming to tea. They were soundly smacked.

When Tom was later freed from the roly-poly pudding in which the rats Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria had encased him under the floor, the joiner, a dog, who sawed through the floorboards, wore a jacket. No trousers.

So Beatrix Potter characters are in a halfway house. When behaving like human beings they don clothes. But they're already equipped with coats of fur.

In real life, dogs are accorded degrees of human status up to adoption as children. On social media a deranged argot called DoggoLingo is put into dogs' mouths. ('Morning hoomans. Dis morning I meet a new fwend... He floofy.') But users of DoggoLingo are not always the offenders in dressing dogs up.

Winter is an excuse for deploying dogs' coats. Some nominally keep dogs warm. Others display them in a fashion that would shame children. I do not think dogs are human, but I know they are susceptible to embarrassment. If presented like contenders for RuPaul's Drag Race they feel pain and don't know what to do. Regarding their owner as leader of the pack, they feel that being laughed at is like being told off for scoffing a ham sandwich from the table. Instead of showing off, they feel like crawling in submission. So please forget the reindeer antlers or little bow-tie.

An unobtrusive coat for a dog might be permissible, like a blanket for a horse, from withers to rump, buckling under the belly. Even this prevents a dog from shaking off water, which owners usually have to suffer in good part when the pond water showers them.

I'd say that a 'doggie trouser suit' has gone too far. Like Beatrix Potter characters, a dog does not need its nether parts covered for reasons of modesty and certainly suffers scatological complications if these are clothed. It's one more reason that other people's dogs, like other people's children, divide society.

I have long held the conviction that Winnie-the-Pooh is a sex pest. Or, at the very least, that he is your common-or-garden pervert, wisely confined to the rural briar rather than loose in an urban conurbation, where he may well find himself put on some kind of register. Though tell that to the picnickers in Hundred Acre Wood on which he's almost definitely peeped...

Of course, the same could be said of Paddington, and he has all of London - plus swathes of free time - to be sordid in. The long, flapping coat and gumboots suggests he's more of a flasher, mind. I suspect the Brown family are fully aware of his proclivities. 'Paddington, you really must stop asking people on Primrose Hill if they want to see your sandwiches.' As for Donald Duck, well, that guy needs confiting before he traumatises anyone else in the military.

The issue, and reason for my assumptions, is the outfits. Messrs The-Pooh, Brown and Duck all wear clothes, as is their right, but they all omit trousers, meaning they look like deviants. Wes Anderson's natty Fantastic Mr Fox and Arthur Read, of the Aardvark fame, managed to wear full, layered costumes. And do you see anybody calling them sex pests in newspaper columns? No you do not.

It is no different for real dogs in real coats. The basic concept is stupid (dogs already have built-in coats) but increasingly acceptable (if you've ever seen a whippet quiver outside a One Stop you'll know those coats aren't always sufficient). We owe it to the dogs to dress them properly, though. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I've had a look, and there's literally no item of human clothing you cannot buy a canine version of. Hats? Any kind you need - from deerstalker to, troublingly, bearskin. Suit and tie? Whatever style you require, sir. On pantsfordogs.com ('Panties with panache for dogs of all shapes and sizes'), I've even found a contoured cummerbund.

So my question for owners of coated dogs is not 'Why is it wearing that?' but 'Why is it only wearing that?' Finish the job you've started. The last thing you need is for people to think you're walking a randy little perv.