WE are all guilty of walking past them without paying them a second glance and wondering just who on earth is at the top of the plinths.

Statues are everywhere across the UK, honouring the good, the great and the downright shocking.

Most of them, of course, have been paid for by the recipient or their families in honour of whatever good works they are alleged to have done.

Some are deserving of being immortalised, others undoubtedly not but most of us don't really think about them, although they can provoke fairly extreme reaction, mainly from historical revisionists.

But now the first ever online catalogue of the UK's statues has been unveiled.

Yes, somebody actually went out and counted them and almost certainly deserves a statue all of their. After a good lie obviously. The charity ArtUK has created the photographic database of 13,500 works of public art and the results are fairly predictable, although it threw up a few quirky facts.

Unsurprisingly, Queen Victoria is the most honoured person with 175 works dedicated to her.

Proof if proof were needed that wealthy Victorians had more money than sense. The data also shows 77% of people depicted are male, 17% female and the rest a mixture of the sexes.

But the catalogue, which is now available online, also reveals there more than 20 statues to dogs and cats. Some are even quite heroic too There are also more than 100 generals and more than 50 admirals. Lord Nelson has 12 statues, Gladstone six.

But much has been done in recent years to try to improve the gender disparity.

One recent installation is Mary Anning, the fossil hunter, in Lyme Regis.

The work, by artist Denise Dutton, is just the latest in a series of women she has recently portrayed, among them the suffragette, Oldham's Annie Kenney and a memorial to the Women's Land Army.

"There's just been a thrust over the last couple of years to show what women have done," she says. "I wanted to show she was a woman of purpose. I wanted her striding off. She was quite determined."

One problem in capturing a likeness is how often women were overlooked in their time and did not receive official portraits. There is just one painting and one pastel of Mary Anning to work from.

When protesters in Bristol tore down the statue of Edward Colston because of his links to slavery, it made headlines.

But the catalogue reveals there are still a few remaining memorials to people with close links to the slave trade.

This number might go up as more biographical detail is added to the entries.

In Edinburgh there is the Melville Monument, a large column in St Andrew Square, which is a memorial to Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.

To some he is the man who delayed the abolition of slavery in the UK and he should be removed But others argue that Dundas actually paved the way for slavery to be scrapped when in 1776, Dundas acted as counsel to Joseph Knight, who had been purchased as a slave in Jamaica and was later taken to Scotland.

As a young man Knight tried to escape from his owner, and when that failed he launched a legal battle for his freedom.

Dundas helped him win his case and this kickstarted the move to abolish the trade.

Of course, both sides are technically correct but does that mean he should be removed from his grand position?

Of course not. And in reality anyway, the column is so high it would need NASA to launch a probe to remove it.

In 1906, a statue of a small brown terrier was erected in Battersea and caused public outrage. It was a memorial to a dog that had been dissected in a medical demonstration.

The statue led to years of protests, rioting and eventually the original brown dog being removed in the middle of the night in 1910. A replacement statue was not erected until 1985.

In Linlithgow, a Dudley the Cat statue is a memorial to his owner, Liz Burrows, who lived by the Union Canal.

She was a leading figure in Burgh Beautiful, a programme to enhance the local area.

When Liz died in 2012, the sculpture of her beloved rescue cat, Dudley was erected in her honour.

Statues can be heartwarming as well as controversial and maybe we should all appreciate them a bit more and discover the meaning behind them.

Rather than howl for ones we think we don't like to be removed, we should all think about the stories and let history judge instead.