On Tuesday the Government launched a consultation on 'Dangerous Dogs' with a fanfare of media coverage about a 12 fold increase in dog fighting and a rising number of dog attacks on postal workers. These issues may, as Ministers suggest, be of growing public concern, but some of the 'solutions' proposed in the consultation bare little, if any, relation to the problems they are supposed to address.
The first problem is that despite the consultation supposedly being on 'Dangerous Dogs' the most fundamental proposals actually affect all dogs and all dog ownership. The consultation suggests that all dogs should be chipped, and that all dogs should have third party liability insurance. This is a classic example of the Government identifying a problem (i.e. reading about it in the tabloids) and then promoting 'eye-catching' solutions which would not actually address the original problem. We all know that the last people who will ever have their dogs micro-chipped or insure them are those who own dogs to fight them or use them as weapons or to intimidate. The burden of these proposals will fall not on those who are a problem, but on those who are no problem at all. Law abiding dog owners whose dogs never pose a threat to anyone will pay millions of pound to chip and insure their dogs whilst the owners of problem dogs continue to ignore the law.
In fact the consultation makes this point itself when it reviews the current legislative framework for dangerous dogs. The Dangerous Dogs Act was amended in 1997 to add a provision for an Index of Exempted Dogs which is essentially a database of dogs of a type prohibited by the Act, which have a stay of execution called a Contingent Destruction Order conditional on a series of requirements from micro-chipping to muzzling. A rapidly growing number of dogs on the Index are not having their third party liability renewed which Defra says is: "indicative that some of the other requirements (muzzled and on a lead in the charge of someone over 16 years old at all times when in a public place) are not being adhered to either". So the Government accepts that a sizeable proportion of those who have already been identified as owning dangerous dogs are ignoring the explicit restrictions put on them. What hope is there that these sort of people are going to comply with new rules on micro-chipping and insurance?
There are amendments that could be made to improve the current legislation, but in the end dangerous dogs are a social problem in exactly the same way as illegal firearms and knife crime. The solution, beyond dealing with the socio-economic problems that create the problem, is effective enforcement in all communities from urban areas where gang culture dominates, to the travelling community. Just last year Defra said that "legislation was sound" in relation to dangerous dogs, but that "more needed to be done to raise awareness of the law and improve enforcement". What cannot be justified are new regulations that will be ignored by the owners of problem dogs, and only enforced on those owners of harmless dogs who are unknowingly in breach of them.
Simon Hart
Chief Executive
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