IT’S A DOG’S LIFE

Not a few par­ents have fallen for the “If we get a pet, I’ll look after it, you won’t have to do a thing, I promise” line that lit­tle kids are so quick with when they want a puppy or a kit­ten. Mine tried to pull the trick on me al­most 12 years ago, and it sort of worked, al­though I’d al­ready been think­ing about get­ting a dog for some time be­fore that.

As I guessed would hap­pen, the ex­cite­ment about hav­ing a puppy in the house even­tu­ally wore off. After more than a decade, Toby is very much a beloved fam­ily mem­ber, and to be fair every­one chips in and helps to look after him, but I am the main care­giver by some mar­gin and over the years that has taken up a great deal of my time and en­ergy.

Not that there isn’t a pay-off. I love hav­ing a dog, and liv­ing in the coun­try­side and work­ing at home means that both of us have man­aged to get the most out of our re­la­tion­ship. With very few ex­cep­tions, each morn­ing for as long as I can re­mem­ber the two of us have been on a brisk hour-long walk that has helped keep us in shape. It’s just one ex­am­ple of how the dog has im­proved my life, and there are many more, but while hav­ing a pet is re­ward­ing, doing the job prop­erly re­quires time, pa­tience, money and com­mit­ment.

Which brings me to Spain’s new an­i­mal wel­fare law that is the sub­ject of our fea­ture start­ing on page 8. When the leg­is­la­tion comes into force later this year, it will es­tab­lish new norms aimed at im­prov­ing the sit­u­a­tion of an­i­mals under the care of hu­mans. Or most of them, but we’ll come to that later. I find it hard to argue, for ex­am­ple, against rules that oblige dog own­ers to show they can look after their pets or that pe­nalise peo­ple for leav­ing dogs tied up or alone for ex­tended pe­ri­ods. Mean­while, cat ster­il­i­sa­tion will be com­pul­sory, es­pe­cially to pre­vent the pro­lif­er­a­tion of feral cats and there will be some species of an­i­mals that can no longer be taken as pets.

Where the leg­is­la­tion has come in for crit­i­cism is its ex­clu­sion of work­ing dogs, par­tic­u­larly hunt­ing dogs. An­i­mal rights pro­tes­tors argue that hunt­ing dogs are just dogs and so de­serve the same pro­tec­tion as non-work­ing dogs, and they ac­cuse the gov­ern­ment of a lack of courage in fail­ing to stand up to pow­er­ful in­ter­ests in rural re­gions where there are also votes to lose. That’s prob­a­bly true, and to make mat­ters worse it is hunt­ing dogs of all dogs that need legal pro­tec­tion the most, as they are among the an­i­mals most com­monly and se­verely mis­treated.

There are other as­pects of the law to crit­i­cise, such as the re­moval of prison sen­tences as a pun­ish­ment for abus­ing an­i­mals in favour of fines and com­mu­nity ser­vice or that it doesn’t cover bull­fight­ing bulls. Yet as a first step I think it should be wel­comed and we should not be sur­prised that po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests get in the way of doing the right thing. It’s the way things work in our sys­tem, but so is amend­ing and en­hanc­ing laws once they are on the books, and this law, im­per­fect though it is, im­proves the sit­u­a­tion of most an­i­mals in Spain.

opin­ion