These dogs are fashion victims | Zoe Williams
For a well-adjusted pet, status dogs who hang out with teenagers beat nutty, Saturday-only labradors hands down
Right, conjure a picture of an open-jawed rottweiler, and we can begin: Alan Johnson (who has twice been bitten by a dog) this week unveiled plans to target dog-owners. Proposals include compulsory micro-chipping and compulsory insurance. The RSPCA is broadly in favour, since it throws responsibility back on to owners, after the misguided Dangerous Dogs Act branded some dogs as simply born badder than others. That legislation was framed by someone who had never met a dog: this consultation paper is more sophisticated.
There is an automatic acceptance that “status dogs” (essentially, bull breeds) in the control of young men (tacitly, who live on council estates) are a problem. Johnson said: “The vast majority of dog owners are responsible, but there is no doubt that some people breed and keep dogs for the sole purpose of intimidating others, in a sense using dogs as a weapon.” By vast majority, he doesn’t mean the vast majority of young men with staffordshire bull terriers, he means the vast majority of families with spaniels.
Reporters and commentators often ask why a young man would even have a tough-looking dog, as if the act of choosing that over a whippet signified evil intent. This is just not true. Everybody wears the uniform of the group to which they wish to state their belonging. Young men want to look cool, that’s why they smoke and motorbikes were invented. There is a world of difference between a young man who thinks he looks cool with a tough dog, and a young man training that dog, or even encouraging it to be vicious.
Furthermore, there’s a subtext here that responsible dog owning is affluent dog owning. Responsible owners automatically have third-party insurance because they have a pet policy (the leading insurer Petplan charges £33 per month to insure a staff-ridgeback cross); and they automatically have their dogs microchipped because they are so upstanding (I’ve yet to find a vet in London charging less than £25).
This easy assumption of equivalence between wealth and responsibility is not just insulting: in no area more than dogs is it so flagrantly wrong. Canines simply don’t buy the values of the market economy: they don’t want an owner with a good job – they would rather have a tramp or a teenager. I always notice how well-adjusted and biddable are the dogs of people who spend a lot of time with them – in contrast to nutty labradors who only see their owners on a Saturday and have the recall of a squirrel. Piers Claughton, the RSPCA’s senior local government adviser, points out: “This is part of the problem of banging on about youths with dogs. They can have a really positive impact. We talk to quite a lot of housing providers, particularly the ones who want to try to ban dogs from estates. But there are a multitude of benefits, from being good for a young person to learn responsibility, to helping them socialise, mix with other people; a dog is a great tool for all of that.”
Still, there are these figures showing a massive rise in status dogs, used as weapons or to intimidate: in London, according to recent figures, the number of dogs seized by the police went up from 263 in 2006-07 to 719 in 2008-09 and a thousand so far this year. The Metropolitan police’s status dog unit wouldn’t comment this week, but did issue a statement last November saying that in the seven months since its launch in March 2009 the unit had carried out 680 seizures.
“The key benefit of the new unit is that it has made the [Met] response to the problem of dangerous dogs more efficient,” it said. Which is brilliant: but it means that more dogs are being seized because a special unit has been set up to seize dogs. It’s not a very exact science, this. The RSPCA has figures relating to an increase in complaints about dog fights – 24 in 2004, 36 in 2005, 137 in 2006, 358 in 2007 (including 132 calls about youths with dogs/fights in streets and parks) and 284 in 2008 (including 188 calls about youths with dogs/fights in streets and parks). First, these are nationwide figures, suggesting that those thousand dogs seized by London police this year were not dogs with youths hanging about looking threatening (more probably, dogs bred for violence in organised crime circles, a very different proposition, and likely to remain unaffected whether the law comes in to require microchipping or not). Second, the figures have spiked and are actually going down. Finally, this problem is not that large.
What we’re looking at, obviously, is not a dog problem but a British election.This is how our politicians fight battles: they introduce a meaningless opposition between the right-thinking and the wrong-uns, then frame overwrought plans to deal with this pilloried small group, whether it’s foxhunters or dog owners. It won’t make a great difference to anything, but it allows us to line up behind something that all sensible people would line up behind. And then we’re supposed to feel good. It’s so uninspiring. Come on, think big, little home secretary! What would Obama do? Would Obama be talking about dogs?
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