Holiday - Day One

The tattoo is finished, although I'm already making plans to extend it!!! Its sore again today but that'll soon pass I'm sure.

The first day of my holiday and Dizzy and I went to the sea side, had a lovely late lunch and a little stroll along the front - interrupted by one "urgent" call from someone who's new dog had made the cats leave home, after spending most of the evening trying to sort something out as I'm fairly near them tomorrow, they informed me at 9pm they'd found a home via the previous owner - lets hope this time it's permanent but I did tell them we were here if for any reason it didn't work out.

Following tonight's episode of Panorama, I'm sure that many people across the country are horrified at the number of dogs that are put to sleep every year due to aggressive behaviour. At Battersea, the figures disclosed showed that almost as many were put to sleep last year as they actually rehomed. This is an awful side to rescue and one that none of us ever ever get used to, but it is sadly a necessary evil in so far as putting a dog that is potentially dangerous back into the public domain is not only irresponsible but could land the rescue involved in court under the dangers dog law. What a lot of people don't realise is that you are held responsible for any behaviour your dog displays, especially if you knew the dog had behaved in that way before - so putting a known biter out for rehoming is not only putting people at risk but also incredibly irresponsible of the charity. Here at Bulldog Rescue we are lucky insofar as we don't see a vast number of situations where dogs are being put down because they are dangerous, but there are a handful that come through the system where it is our only option. One of the vets on the program summed things up perfectly by saying that putting them down was not the rescues responsibility - it was the owner who had failed the dog by not taking responsibility for the dog's behaviour and in most cases turn them out as strays or gifting them in with a watered down version of events. We see approximately 5-10 cases each year where the dog is deemed too dangerous to rehome (and we don't put anything down for being dog aggressive as sadly that's often a bulldog trait), but we receive fairly high number of calls from people who's reason for rehoming is due to a bite where the dogs never come into the system. We consistently see vets who refuse to put the dog to sleep and we even get calls from the vets themselves begging us to do something to save the dog when we simply cannot take the risk, not only to the general public but to the reputation of the breed.

I've already received emails this evening asking what we can do, once again I will get on my soap box and scream two words "DOG LICENCE". As the RSPCA chap pointed out, there are tighter rules in respect of owning a television and for some reason the government are so dead against any kind of licencing system that things can only get worse (and I never thought I'd actually agree with anything an RSPCA spokesman had to say!). You can read my thoughts here with regard to the need for a licence and for compulsory microchipping which would (in most cases) identify the person that callously abandoned their dog for whatever reason and like the number plate on a car would track ownership throughout the dogs life time. Status symbol dogs, breeding for money, breeding because "it's good for the bitch to have one litter" has to stop, they interviewed one SBT "breeder" (and I use the term lightly) who openly admitted his bitch was a rescue! She'd whelped six pups in the kitchen of his tower block flat.

All I can say at this point is thank goodness we are not Staffordshire Bull Terrier rescue because right now these poor people simply cannot cope with the number of dogs being abandoned after being trained to be dog aggressive - there is no future for these poor dogs and rescues across the UK will continue to have to kill healthy dogs because society made them into monsters. Until the laws are tightened up when it comes to dog ownership nothing will ever change I'm afraid and I can only see things getting worse and worse from this point on