Like an animal

Mario Spiteri, the man who cracked down on tobacco while working elsewhere in the public service, appears to be tackling his responsibilities at the Animal Welfare Department with the same sort of zeal.

Raids on places where animals are reported to be ill-treated are taking place more often. But then again it might just seem that way because of better media relations, which leads to improved news coverage of the department’s activities.

Even so, that kind of media exposure is a good thing in itself, because it heightens people’s awareness of the problem and encourages them to report cases of abuse which they might have previously ignored.

It does more than that. It alerts them to what constitutes abuse. It is surprising just how many people think it’s all right to treat animals in a certain way. This is not because they are intrinsically unkind, but because they are ignorant of the fact that what they are doing is cruel and damaging.

I remember being taken aback at reading an article by a columnist in one of our national newspapers some years ago, in which she described how she and her husband would lock up their Rottweiler puppy, at night and while they were out at work, in a cage designed for transporting pets for short stints of time and on rare occasions. This was so it wouldn’t chew the place up or urinate where it shouldn’t. They didn’t realise that what they were doing was wrong because the puppy didn’t seem to object.

The Animal Welfare Department needs to set in train a public information campaign, utilising such limited funds as it may have available, refining our definition of what constitutes cruelty to animals, because it remains amorphous. People are just about waking up to the understanding that dogs – I mention them because they are the most common pets and the most susceptible to cruelty because of their particular requirements – should not be kept locked in basements, cell-like rooms or garages round the clock except for a quick 15-minute walk, if that, in the evening.

When people see dogs locked in tiny spaces or cages, they understand that this is cruel and they ring the Animal Welfare Department or the police, who appear to have instructions not to laugh us out of the station when making this kind of report as they used to do until not so long ago.

But how many people report the cruelty of dogs kept on house-roofs without ever being let down? When such reports are made it is not for the sake of the dogs, but by neighbours who are driven to the point of insanity by sleep deprivation caused by relentless and desperate barking, the canine version of nagging and crying. So many people seem to be entirely unaware that keeping a dog on a roof is cruel. They keep dogs on roofs as they used to keep pigeons and chickens, and common practice has given it a form of respectability. It is not something of which to be ashamed.

There is the occasional letter to the newspaper from visitors to Malta or from expatriates who have made their home here, expressing surprise and concern at all these dogs confined on rooftops in all weathers and with no exercise or human contact. To people from northern Europe, dogs are either working dogs, expected to perform a useful task like hunting, shepherding or guarding land, or they are pets. If a dog isn’t required for the first purpose or desired for the second, then it isn’t kept at all. Dogs which are kept as pets are properly looked after, allowed into the home, have constant human contact and are part of the family.

A dog on a roof is….what? It certainly isn’t a pet because it isn’t part of the family or permitted entry to the home. The only human contact it has is when somebody goes up to hang out the laundry or take it down, to freshen up the water-bowl or to chuck the usual crusts that make up the animal’s food.

The owner appears to derive no pleasure or use from the animal and the animal in turn suffers. So why is it done? It’s done because this is the way dogs have been kept here in Malta for longer than anyone can remember. You kept a dog like you kept a pig or chickens. The pig went into the cellar and got thrown scraps. The chickens went into the yard and got thrown other scraps. And the dog went up on the roof with the pigeons, and got the occasional crust. The chickens and the pig were kept for food, but those others up there on the roof were kept, interestingly, as a passatemp.

In an effort at understanding the mindset of people who keep dogs on roofs, I quizzed a couple of them – not pryingly, of course, but out of genuine interest and because I keep dogs myself, though never on the roof. The people to whom I spoke appear to believe that they are providing their dog with all it needs. It has a rudimentary shelter to keep off the worst of the sun and the rain. It is fed and given water. And that’s it. It has no canine company and its human contact is restricted to five minutes a day. It never leaves the roof. It swelters in summer and gets cold and wet in winter.

One of these people explained how he had provided his dog with a really sound shelter made of asbestos sheeting, but the dog chewed it up (out of boredom and despair, but he couldn’t understand that). I asked what happened to the dog, given that I am alive to the dangers of chewing asbestos, only to be told that it had developed a tumour and died.

What is the point of keeping a dog in that way, I asked one woman, falling unforgivably into rudeness. She stared at me blankly, nonplussed. The point? There doesn’t have to be a point, surely. “But I’m giving it a home,” she said. Then I realised the root cause of this problem: anthropomorphising animals. In our strangely twisted way, while we treat animals worse than – well, animals, at the same time we interpret their situation with reference to human beings.

Keeping a dog exposed on a roof where it goes out of its mind with distress is ‘saving’ it from being put down. It is saving a life. I tell them that there is no intrinsic value to a dog’s life in the same way that there is with human life, and that the moral choice between putting a dog down and letting it struggle in appalling conditions alone on a roof for years is – that’s right, putting the dog down.

But I can see how people, even quite educated people let alone those who aren’t, battle with this idea and believe it to be the other way round. As long as a dog is alive, they say, it is better off than it would be dead, whatever the conditions in which it lives. Conditions on rooftops may be bad but they are not that bad in the sense that the dog is not being beaten or starved. They use the same reasoning they would use for human beings, though they are at the same time oblivious to the fact that the obligation to uphold human life has nothing at all to do with whether a person is better off alive or dead.

A veterinarian tells me that one of the greatest obstacles animal welfare professionals face in rooting out situations in which animals are ill-treated or poorly kept is just this sort of mindset. People are reluctant to report abuse unless they have cast-iron assurance that the dog will not be put down.

“It is pointless trying to explain to them that a suffering dog is better off dead, and that if death is the only way that the suffering can be ended, then that is what it has to be. There is this romantic notion that there should be a happy ending to every story, and failing that, no ending,” this veterinarian said. The remarks were prompted by my own frustration with somebody I know who refuses to report (or to tell me where they are so that I can report them myself) two dogs kept permanently on a tight leash in an open field, with no shelter and only occasional food. “If I report them, ‘they’ will take them away and kill them,” this woman told me, “and I don’t want to be responsible for their death.”

Sometimes she feeds them herself. I asked her why she doesn’t just slash their leash and let them run. She thought about this for a minute, and then I was treated to another aspect of the Maltese mindset: “Because the owner might see me doing it, and then pay me back.”

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.