Animal welfare, human rights

The Animal Welfare Department has been working hard to deal with reports of cruelty to animals, but the last time it made the news, it got carried away to the extent that it appears to have broken the law itself.

Officers of the Animal Welfare Department climbed onto the balcony of a flat, sedated a dog they found there, carried it off and had it killed. They did this without prior notice to the owner of the flat and the dog, Keith Caruana, without a court order, and when Mr Caruana was not at home.

He returned from a few hours of fishing to find that public officials had effectively trespassed on his private property, taken one of his dogs and spirited it away to be put down. They had also picked up another of his dogs which was roaming about the streets, and that too was killed.

Unless I am terribly mistaken, the Animal Welfare Department has the right (duty?) to pick up dangerous dogs which are left to roam about, but if those dogs are known to have an owner, then they cannot have them destroyed as they would strays, because this would be tantamount to the theft and destruction of another person’s private property. The destruction of dangerous dogs can be ordered only by the court, not by the police and certainly not by the Animal Welfare Department on the initiative of some public officer who doesn’t know the law. And that is presupposing that this dog was dangerous, which it clearly was not – but more about this later.

More so, the court cannot order the destruction of a dog which has the potential to cause harm to others (many dogs have this potential), but only dogs which have actually been proven to have attacked and harmed a person. And even this is not enough: if the person who is attacked is an intruder into private property – a thief, a vandal, or some such – and the dog is a guard dog kept for the express purpose of keeping intruders out, then the court may decide that the dog was simply doing its job and defending its territory against that intruder with evil intent. And it is not the dog which is prosecuted – obviously – but the owner. The dog simply pays part of the price, with its life.

“It’s as though they have killed part of my family. Those dogs never hurt anyone and I was never given the chance to defend them,” Mr Caruana told a reporter. “I want to know who was responsible, and will take legal action to ensure that justice is done.” But he cannot find out who is responsible because they’re all passing the buck like children in trouble.

Mr Caruana is right. There is an important principle at stake here. Public officers, no matter who they may be, cannot trespass on your private property when you are not there (MEPA inspectors can demand entry, but they are an exception), lift your property and have it destroyed.

Dogs belong to their owner. There is absolutely no legal difference between a public officer climbing onto your balcony to take your dog and have it destroyed and a public officer doing the same thing with your barbecue set, your outdoor furniture or even your diamond necklace that might be on that same balcony. Both amount to the theft and destruction of another person’s property, and there are no two ways about it.

Heaven forbid we should have a situation in which the Animal Welfare Department begins taking the initiative of climbing into people’s balconies and gardens, taking their dogs and destroying them without a court order and with no evidence that these dogs are being abused or that they pose a danger to anyone. That is fascism.

Initial reports said that the Animal Welfare Department took the dog off the balcony after seeking and obtaining permission from the police. I read that and said: “What? Whoever wrote that report hasn’t a clue about the law, fundamental rights and civil liberties. If those really are the facts, then that is the story – the police doing something they may not do: giving public officials permission to enter private homes and take private property.”

The next thing we knew, the police were denying that they gave the order to have the dogs put down – obviously, because it is not within their remit to give any such order. The director of the Animal Welfare Department washed his hands of responsibility for this, too. “We took the dogs to the SPCA, where they were put down by a vet after being asked to do so by the police, who claimed they were dangerous,” he told a newspaper, passing the blame on. Rather a lot hinges on the punctuation of that sentence, which I have quoted. The apportioning of blame changes if you insert a comma after the word ‘vet’.

Let’s leave aside the matter of who had those dogs killed when they had an owner, they weren’t being ill-treated and they hadn’t attacked anyone. How did the Animal Welfare Department get hold of one of those dogs in the first place? By climbing into a private home when the owner was away. There is no evidence that the department attempted to contact the owner at any point. When Mr Caruana left home to go fishing, his dogs were there. When he came back, they were gone. He didn’t even find an official letter, informing him that his dogs had been taken by the Animal Welfare Department. That’s how scant official regard is for people rights over their private property.

The neighbours, far from being concerned that we now have public officials climbing onto people’s balconies and taking their dogs to be killed, were thrilled. They had felt threatened by the animals, you see. This is because one of them wore a spiked collar (as though it was the dog’s sartorial choice, and not the owner’s) and was an American mastiff with a brindle coat. This is the equivalent of being frightened of all Africans because their skin is black.

The police went to the scene when a construction-site worker reported that a ‘vicious-looking dog’ was on the loose. This reminded me of the woman who told a newspaper some months ago that she was scared to jog in a certain area of St Julian’s because of “all the Africans hanging around”.

Vicious-looking is not the same as vicious, but so many people know so little about dogs that this is a common mistake. You can tell a dog is vicious by its body language, and not by its breed-type or its brindle coat, still less its owner’s choice of collar.

When I saw the photographs of this ‘vicious’ dog (a year-old American mastiff called Achilles) in the back of a van on its way to be put down, I laughed at the tragic stupidity of it all. Achilles stood in the back of that van completely at ease, delighted at all the attention he was receiving, with that typical ‘I am enjoying this’ dog ‘smile’ which dog-novices interpret as a pre-attack grimace, simply because teeth are on show.

A really vicious dog would never have allowed itself to be put in the back of a van by complete strangers, and sedation using darts shot from a distance would have been necessary. But even that would have been difficult because a dog in attack mode will not hang around waiting for you to shoot your darts but will go straight for your throat. This dog clearly wasn’t sedated. It was standing up and enjoying itself, fully unaware that these nice people with the van weren’t taking it for an outing but to be put down.

The animal welfare officer himself said later that the dog wasn’t aggressive “at the time”. Thank you, sir: we have the photographic evidence to prove it. And shouldn’t an animal welfare officer know that dogs, like people, are either aggressive or not aggressive? They are not “aggressive at the time” or “some of the time”. Aggression is a matter of temperament. If Achilles wasn’t aggressive towards a bunch of strangers, some of them in uniform and wearing hats (hats really set off aggressive dogs, for some reason), who picked him up and bundled him into a van, then he wasn’t aggressive at all, at any time. He can’t have been, because he had passed the ultimate test: allowing people he had never seen before to pick him up and cart him off.

The other dog that was taken, the one on the balcony, an 11-year-old at the end of his natural lifespan, called Stone, couldn’t have been vicious, either, because if he had been, there is no way on earth that anyone but his owner or another familiar could have got anywhere near that balcony. “But he was sedated,” somebody told me. “They used a dart!”

Yes, right you are. Would that have been one of those magical darts with the properties of a guided missile, that can be shot from the ground at a dog sheltered by the stone wall of a balcony, performing a U-turn in mid-air to hit him? I don’t think so. Whoever sedated that dog had to go up a ladder leaning against the very balcony in which it sat, and my own personal experience of highly territorial dogs makes me well aware that if Stone were predisposed to attacking intruders, the animal welfare officer would have found a jaw wrapped round his head immediately his head popped up above the parapet.

If he managed to sedate the dog while balancing on a ladder within the dog’s reach, then I can tell you that the dog didn’t need sedation at all. I wasn’t surprised when the photographs released to the media by Mr Caruana showed a really mild-looking creature, and a very old one too.

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday yesterday.