In the Dog House

Yeah, I'm back and, readers, I bet you missed me. All of you. Millions of readers, I've got.

I was perusing the Mail Online this evening, as I often do, and clicked, as is my wont, on all the animal-related stories. Here's a doozy: they ran a feature on a Tumblr blog devoted to 'dogshaming', where people post photos of their dogs along with signs written in the first person describing (or 'confessing to') whatever 'crime' the dog in question has committed.

I'm not saying I didn't find any of them funny - the dog who pukes under the bed looks like a lad, and I like the one about humping the cat - but scrolling down a page of these images began to feel more and more unpleasant. The problem was that the signs were not always celebrations of the fundamental wack-ness of dogs. They were accusations written in character but expressing the frustration of owners who seem to see behaviour that is either natural (eating everything they can get hold of) or the result of poor training as genuinely shameful. But dogs have no shame, only submissive responses to disapproval.

Look at the site if you think I'm exaggerating: there is one dog that is shamed for destroying carpets when left alone - this is a well known symptom of anxiety and boredom. There is a dog that is obviously unhappy whose sign reads 'I like peeing on everything'. That is another classic symptom of anxiety and fear.

These pictures are posted as jokes but many of them depict attitudes to animals that are potentially if not actually abusive. I like animal pictures, I like dogs, I like the Daily Mail (yeah, shoot me) but seeing this just made me think more than ever that there should be legal processes in place to make pet ownership less easy to walk into. A dog is a dog and it cannot be publicly humiliated by having its picture online. The desire of some owners to revenge themselves in this way on dependent animals is the real exhibit in the dogshaming gallery. And it's not funny.




Addendum: the twat who runs this blog has put up a message encouraging viewers not to 'waste [their] breath' on criticising the premise of the site. 'Shaming people for shaming dogs is a tad ironic, no?' sayeth the twat. I don't think he/she has a very strong grasp on the location of the irony in this case.

The right to own and the need to kill

Yesterday a 62 year old man, Terry Thompson, turned 56 exotic animals loose on his Ohio neighbourhood and then killed himself. At the time of writing the animals - apart from a single monkey - are no longer a danger to the public. 48 of them have been shot dead.

The slaughtered animals include 18 Bengal tigers and 17 lions. Numbers of tigers have been reduced by 95% since 1900; every sub-species of tiger is on the critically endangered list. The combined actions of Terry Thompson and the Ohio police have, in 24 hours, significantly added to the waste of a dying species.

The police have defended their shoot-to-kill policy: the animals had been abused and underfed; they were dangerous and aggressive and were roaming in a domestic area. One unspecified 300.lb animal was shot with a tranquiliser dart and subsequently "went crazy" and had to be killed anyway.

The rights and wrongs of the mission to destroy a menagerie of exotic mammals could be debated; the police have a duty to defend the public and feel no such obligation to value the lives of wild animals. The unbelievably weak restrictions on exotic pet ownership in Ohio - among the weakest in the United States, which is saying something - are indisputably to blame for this episode, which is not exactly unprecedented: Thompson had been in trouble before about animal escapes, and a neighbour was quoted as saying she had been living in fear for her family's safety. Besides, Ohio has one of the highest rates of injuries and deaths caused by exotic pets.

Once again, the price to pay for our lack of respect for animals, and their right to live a natural life in a safe and protected habitat, has been paid by the animals themselves. Their deaths reward our stubbornness and stupidity, and the misguided sense of a human right to ownership that was encoded in Ohio's very lack of legal restrictions.

The last monkey, by the way? It has "a herpes related disease". So when it is found, as a safety measure, it will probably be shot.