Living With Dogs (17 page)

When I became a vet the public mainly saw the issue of cruelty in terms of overt cruelty, which meant the infliction of pain and suffering on an animal by a human. It was some time before the covert cruelty of neglect, such as confining animals to cages, or the subtleties of starvation, came to the fore. When I commenced practice in Melbourne the major issue with dogs was how strays were rounded up and handled in the public pounds and, ultimately, how they were destroyed. The prevailing attitude was that stray dogs were little better than vermin; they were nuisance animals that had to be taken off the streets and got rid of as quickly as possible.

Much of the pressure to deal with strays fell on the Lost Dogs’ Home in North Melbourne, which had been founded in 1910 as a charitable institution to ‘help lost, strayed, sick or injured animals who, for any reason, have no human being who will help them in their distress’. In 1913 the Home had taken in 1400 dogs, but by the late 1970s it was having to accommodate up to 27,000 dogs a year in facilities that were by now antiquated and inadequate. In one extreme circumstance they had to accept 700 in one day.

When I first visited the Lost Dogs’ Home in 1965 it had a huge impact on me. The buildings were in decay, the pens were crowded, and there was no application of veterinary science. Dogs were not vaccinated on entry, and whilst things were kept clean, there was no routine application of disinfectant. They were doing a good job with limited resources, but I knew that if veterinary science principles had been adopted there would be a great improvement in the quality of the lives of the animals. The thing that angered me was the attitude of not treating the dogs on entry because they were strays, and therefore second-class animals, and why spend money on those that were about to die anyway?

There had also been growing public concern about the euthanasia methods used at the Home. Until natural gas was introduced to Melbourne in 1969, the dogs that could not be adopted were destroyed in a gas chamber. Later a decompression chamber was introduced, which worked by denying oxygen to the dogs, who then blacked out after four minutes. The RSPCA pressed successfully for the dogs to be destroyed individually, with a barbiturate injection, which is now the current practice in all shelters.

Being confronted with the conditions at the Lost Dogs’ Home committed me to the need for changes in the governance of the RSPCA, so that we could establish new standards for the treatment of stray animals. The RSPCA at that time did not have kennels, and as soon as dogs came in, they would be sent off to the Lost Dogs’ Home. I knew we needed to introduce an animal hospital and shelter at the RSPCA’s Victorian headquarters in Burwood, and I was fortunate to have a Board and chief executive officer who supported me.

Around 1980 the RSPCA in Victoria was handling about 10,000 animals annually, and it did so without the benefit of any in-house veterinary service to treat the animals. I proposed that a veterinary clinic ought to be established at Burwood with resident employed staff, and when word reached the Australian Veterinary Association (AVA), and in particular the Melbourne practitioners, they began lobbying the RSPCA Board on the grounds that the clinic would be uneconomic, and would duplicate services that were already available. What they didn’t say was that the establishment of an RSPCA clinic would bring unwarranted competition to veterinary practitioners.

They put up alternatives, but these all foundered because it was glaringly obvious that the various schemes weren’t based on the belief that stray, sick and injured dogs had exactly the same rights to proper veterinary care as animals belonging to fee-paying private clients. Most of the schemes they proposed involved outside vets treating the animals after they had looked after their own clients. We said the strays had equal priority, and must be attended to without delay.

It was a watershed for the RSPCA and the AVA. For the first time the veterinary profession was forced to consider whether stray animals deserved the same standard of veterinary treatment as normally owned animals, or whether they should remain second-class animals. Veterinarians had to face up to their professional obligations, and whether they should expect a fee for everything they did. They also had to confront the first guiding principle of the AVA’s Code of Ethics, which states that ‘the primary concern of the veterinary profession is for the welfare of animals’.

All we wanted to do was relieve the suffering of sick and injured dogs, and we found ourselves opposed by the veterinary practitioners of Melbourne. The veterinary profession was telling me there would be no RSPCA clinic in Melbourne. I’m quite capable of reaching a compromise, and I’ve had to negotiate many during my time as RSPCA president since 1972, but I will never accept an organisation laying down the law to me.

I could have understood the opposition if it had been confined to an individual group of vets with a practice next door to the RSPCA clinic, and who feared the impact on their livelihood. The RSPCA Board had tried to overcome this kind of concern by issuing a directive that the primary obligation of the clinic was the care of animals committed to the RSPCA, and that no RSPCA vet was to engage in private practice unless the needs of all the animals in the care of the RSPCA had been met.

The shelter and an accompanying veterinary clinic opened in February 1981 and when animals came in they were given a full veterinary examination, wormed, treated for any illnesses, and prepared for adoption or, alternatively, a humane death. The RSPCA also encouraged the government to introduce a code of practice for pounds and shelters. It also discouraged the use of shelter dogs for live animal experimentation.

The opening of the RSPCA clinic at the Burwood shelter caused a bitter and long-lasting conflict with many of my veterinary colleagues, who had lobbied to stop the clinic opening because it might affect their own practices. It caused a collision between the RSPCA and the AVA that was not resolved for many years, and which led to my being ostracised by the AVA, and dumped from the position of AVA honorary federal secretary.

Even today, 30 years later, many individual veterinarians still oppose the clinic and will not assist the RSPCA in any way. In my view, the response of some of my colleagues suggested they had little appreciation of the rights of animals, and their attitude seemed to be governed by factors other than animal welfare. I felt they were acting more like a trade union than a profession. The animosities built up over that issue have never been forgotten.

I had always had strong feelings for animals, to the point where, in my younger days, friends and family sometimes accused me of ignoring the natural order, and putting animals before humans. I wasn’t ignoring the natural order, it was just that I preferred working with animals. I spoke for those who could not speak for themselves. The issue for me was that animals needed more protection than they had, and they needed vocal support from people who made a living from them, which included veterinarians.

Some veterinarians agreed with my views but thought they were impractical, and that I was forgetting where veterinarians derived their income. My attitude was that if I was going to be the animals’ advocate, I had to be the advocate, come what may. There is a terror among some of my colleagues that if you speak up, you will lose income, and I’m sure I have. No-one comes to Hugh Wirth any more to get their dogs’ tails cut off, and how much income have I lost over that?

Apart from the issue of the treatment of strays by RSPCA vets, the general welfare of dogs did not cause much conflict within the veterinary profession. Dogs have a favoured position in the animal pecking order, and affection for this animal transcends all social classes and groupings. They’ve displaced the horse in the affection of Australians, and they are loved equally by workers and directors, town and country people.

From 1980, part of the RSPCA’s strategy for making the organisation more relevant to the community has been to publish policy statements on the justified and acceptable use of animals by humans. Two of these policies, desexing and tail-docking, brought us into fierce conflict with dog breeders.

Up to that point, the community had tended to the view that animals could be adapted or modified to suit humans, but the RSPCA was now questioning the right of humans to make those changes which were not essential for the animal’s welfare. It had become accepted practice that breeders cut off the tails of dogs like Rottweilers, Cocker Spaniels, Boxers, and German Short-haired Pointers, and the rules of showing certain breeds even demanded that the dogs tails’ be docked. The RSPCA anti-docking campaign eventually triumphed — on 1 April 2004 the docking of dogs’ tails for purely cosmetic purposes was made a criminal offence throughout Australia.

Throughout the world one of the major animal welfare problems is that of the stray dog. How this problem is dealt with varies from culture to culture and in many cases the suffering endured by stray dogs is compounded by the cruelty used to capture these dogs and euthanase them.

The obvious answer is to limit the number of dogs born with the ultimate aim that all puppies born will be placed in a good home and enjoy a fulfilling life. In Australia the RSPCA believes that all dogs that are to be kept as pets, whether male or female, should be compulsorily desexed before puberty.

The benefits that accrue from desexing are not limited to prevention of reproduction. There are many health issues that do not occur in dogs that have been desexed, and often behaviour is greatly modified, especially in male dogs.

To emphasise the gravity of the situation facing the RSPCA shelter network, in 2008–2009 the RSPCA alone nationally admitted to its shelters 69,383 dogs of which 22,896 were reclaimed by owners and 19,236 were adopted. The remaining 22,085 were euthanased. RSPCA (Victoria) figures for the same period were dog admissions 18,116, reclaimed 8846, adopted 4939 and euthanased 3958. The figures are far worse for cats.

Politicians are loath to enact legislation requiring the compulsory desexing of pets, leaving the issue to be decided at the municipal level. Those municipalities that have enacted local laws on compulsory desexing have usually limited the legislation to the desexing of cats. The Australian Veterinary Association is opposed to compulsory desexing of pet animals stating that this will not reduce excess numbers of animals.

The AVA does not offer a viable alternative action that will assist animal welfare groups in dramatically slashing the current shelter euthanasia rates.

The debate is not limited to compulsory desexing, but includes a quasi-academic argument on when to desex. For obvious reasons the RSPCA will not adopt out any dog that has not been desexed and this often means desexing puppies as early as eight weeks of age. There is no published scientific work that suggests that early age desexing causes later problems. Whenever I am faced with argument from my veterinary colleagues on this matter I am reminded of a survey of British veterinarians on the question of when is the best time to desex a pet animal. The winning response was ‘At 11 am straight after morning tea’.

Many of us will remember growing up in new suburbs on the edge of rural areas and can recall local people living alone with a great many dogs or cats. These people were always reclusive and were living in very poorly kept habitation.

Nowadays we recognise these people as having a mental illness resulting in them becoming animal hoarders. They have no capacity to look after the large number of animals that they accumulate and in fact they are incapable of acknowledging that the animals are suffering from their neglect.

Resolving the issue is difficult. Many of the animals rescued from such a situation are in practical terms not able to be rehabilitated. Co-ordinating all of the various authorities to assist resolution is not easy as the mental health condition is not well recognised. Recidivism is almost 100 per cent. Simply prosecuting the person responsible for the animal cruelty solves nothing. Better surveillance at the local level to ensure discovery of animal hoarding at an early stage is essential. The Victorian Domestic Animals Act limits the ownership of dogs to two unless a permit is granted to own a larger number.

Puppy breeding establishments take many forms and can be seen to be a continuum from extremely bad (puppy farms, exploitive hoarders) through to excellent (dog enthusiasts who put the animals’ health and welfare as the first priority).

Puppy farming is the indiscriminate breeding of dogs on a large scale for the purposes of sale. Puppy farms, also known as puppy mills or puppy factories, are essentially commercial operations with an emphasis on production and profit with little or no consideration given to the welfare of the animals. Puppy farms are intensive systems with breeding animals and their puppies kept in facilities that fail to meet the animals’ psychological, behavioural, social or physiological needs. As a result of a failure to meet acceptable animal welfare standards many of these animals have a poor quality of life. Puppy farming and animal hoarding are generally considered to be different phenomena based on the owner’s motivation for having the animals. However, in many ways the results can be similar — a large number of animals kept in extremely poor conditions.

Once again poorly worded legislation, together with poor enforcements standards, permits puppy farms to develop without being accountable for the suffering and cruelty that occurs.

Although there has been a dramatic shift in community attitudes to cruelty in the last 20 years the fact is that we still permit the over-breeding, and therefore the oversupply, of puppies for which there are not sufficient homes available. Many of us continue to wrongly select a puppy and, having done so, fail to educate and train it so that it becomes a valued pet. We blame the dog for these failings, never ourselves, and think nothing of getting rid of it at the first available opportunity. Dumping the dog out of a car in a remote area, or simply allowing the dog to take its chances by wandering off via a deliberately left open back gate, is recognised as a cruel act throughout Australia. The unwanted dog could have easily been surrendered at an RSPCA shelter with few questions asked, so why does dumping still happen?