Scruffy: A confident lad, fun and friendlyOn Thursday, waiting outside a council pound in Yorkshire, I met Scruffy, who had just been picked up on a busy street in Leeds.
He is a white and tan Jack Russell, about three years old and, though confused, was confident and friendly, bouncing around on tip-toe as if to say: 'Here I am! Where's my mum? Who are you?'
The warden took Scruffy into the pound, put him in a kennel and locked the door.
Scruffy, who has no microchip or collar, has until May 6 before he is taken down the hall and his life ended without ceremony.
A vet will slip a needle into his skin and a lethal injection will be administered.
Scruffy is young and fit, and I have no doubt he would make a loving pet for any family. And yet he has a death sentence hanging over his head.
And he is not alone. One dog every hour is being executed in this way in Britain, for no other reason than that there is no one who will give them a home. It is a shameful state of affairs, and one which, as I discovered this
week, may well get worse before it gets better.
A Dogs Trust survey found that last year 107,228 dogs were abandoned on our streets - an increase of 11 per cent on 2008.
We don't see these dogs running around, rummaging in bins. Of course not: that would be bad for government PR. The reality is that these dogs are caught by council-employed dog wardens and then they disappear into a big, black hole.
The whole dirty business is secretive, to say the least. I phoned scores of local authorities last week, trying to get permission to spend time alongside just one dog warden and to glimpse inside a council pound.
'We are on a training day,' said the head of communications in Hackney. 'You haven't given us enough notice,' said her counterpart in South Wales. 'We won't have time to brief wardens.'
Ginger: Fond of companyBut I did find out that the way stray dogs are 'processed' in Britain is chaotic, and I believe callous. Some councils run their own kennels; the majority have contracts with commercial boarding kennels; a smattering have spaces in rehoming centres run by small charities.
The dogs are kept in pounds for a maximum of seven days. The lucky ones are claimed, or moved from the temporary pound into longer-term rehoming centres. But every single hour of every single day, one dog is killed by lethal injection.
Many are deemed by the dog warden as 'not rehomeable': too old, too blind, too ugly or too 'aggressive'. I spoke to one warden, who refused to be named, and asked him whether a week is enough time for a dog to be properly assessed. Most, surely, are scared and bewildered.
'We try to make friends with them, but the pressure is just too great,' he told me. 'There is a zero tolerance policy to get them off the streets and then deal with them .. .'
The problem is that the dogs languishing in pounds simply have nowhere else to go.
Over the past few days, I have been talking to the (mostly) women who run re-homing centres the length and breadth of the country, and they all tell me they are unable to cope.
Celia Hammond, perhaps the most famous of these tireless women, who runs a free clinic and re-homing centre in Canning Town, East London, told me: 'I've never seen anything like it.'
Wandering through her kennels - she takes in dogs and cats, as well as the occasional rabbit - there are animals everywhere: in corridors, in the loos, in her bedroom.
The problem is not confined to urban areas - far from it. Working dogs are
being turfed out by farmers who can no longer afford them or who have lost their businesses.
I went to visit Wiccaweys, a small charity near Nottingham run by a couple offering sanctuary to more than 30 border collies abandoned by farmers after years of service.
'A big problem is that farmers often breed from their collies, thinking they can sell the puppies to earn cash,' they told me. 'But collies need the right home, where they get enough exercise and are properly trained.'
The reasons for the explosion in the number of dogs facing euthanasia are complex.
First, legislation in 2008, the Clean Neighbourhoods & Environment Act, wrestled the responsibility of rounding up dogs and keeping them in kennels until they were claimed or found a home away from the police and into the hands of local authorities.
Most police stations used to have kennels out the back, but they were all closed down. In London alone, this meant the number of kennels dropped from several hundred to just 15.
Lucy: Medium size cross breed - a quiet soul who likes a fussVery few councils had kennels, which meant contracts were given to commercial kennels to take in strays. The council pays 70p per dog per day for the first seven days, and also for any emergency medical treatment.
After that, support stops. So the commercial boarding kennels and charitable rehoming centres will gladly accept the council contract to raise revenue - then baulk at the cost of feeding and caring for a dog for the six months or even a year it will take to rehome, and so will be more likely to put down the animal.
On top of all this, in 2008 we saw the start of the recession, which meant that donations to animal charities plummeted. A survey of small dog rehoming centres in Britain has found funding is down by almost 40pc. At the same time, costs have rocketed due to the number of dogs being abandoned.
I spoke to Karina Collins of the HULA (Home for Unwanted and Lost Animals) rescue centre near Milton Keynes. 'We have ordinary families coming to us saying they can no longer afford their dog,' she said.
'We saw a mother the other day tying a lovely German shepherd to a lamp-post. She had her son with her, who was crying. We caught up with her and asked why she had not taken the dog to a charity, and she said she was too ashamed.
Daisy: A rather tubby Staff who's a real softie'We had a dog knocked down in Leighton Buzzard, and the owner just left the dog lying in the road. He wandered off, saying he couldn't afford the vet bills.'
At the Mayhew rehoming charity in North London, which acts as the pound for Brent Council, there are 1,000 dogs on a waiting list for a space.
Caroline Brown, its head of animal welfare, told me: 'It's all breeds. Of the 128 dogs wardens brought to us last month, 33 were staffies, 15 were rottweilers, ten were collies. We even get labradors from "back garden" breeding, and huskies.
Because of the pressure on this centre, the charity puts down healthy dogs that show aggression 'over toys, food, anything like that'.
The final nail in the coffin of Britain's dogs came when it became fashionable to own staffie and bulldog types as 'weapons' and status symbols.
In Yorkshire, I spoke to Marianne, a volunteer in her 40s, who works tirelessly trying to get dogs on death row into rehoming centres.
She told me there is what she described as a staffie holocaust - particularly after a story appears in the papers about a dog savaging a child. 'A family might have had the staffie for years, but they are suddenly worried it will "turn", so they turf it out,' she said.
Mutley: A Petterdale terrier, aged 1-2. Sweet-natured but scared by kennel noiseShe also told me about Olive, a staffie cross who had been abandoned because she was old. For some cruel reason, her owner had covered her in emulsion paint.
Celia Hammond told me about a staffie pup who'd had her legs broken and been blinded by her owner, then abandoned.
The stories are endless. Even Battersea Dogs Home, the most famous animal charity in Britain, which also acts as the main council pound for the Greater London area, is experiencing a tremendous squeeze. Donations last year were 1.4 million down on 2008.
I asked Laura Jenkins, director of animal welfare, whether they are struggling to find homes for their dogs, and was told that there are no long-term residents at Battersea: they all find homes.
I found this hard to believe, as Battersea is non-selective, meaning that it takes all dogs - half of which are staffie types. This must mean, I said, that they put down dogs.
'We do, but only if they are suffering or deemed unsuitable for rehoming,' Laura told me. 'We have a team of behaviourists who assess the dogs.'
Suki: Female cross-breed, 6-7 years old, timid but lovingWhen I asked how many were put down at Battersea last year, she refused to tell me.
The most unnecessary contributory factor in this explosion of unwanted dogs is the ludicrous policy of local authorities to ban dogs from rented accommodation. In Camden, even existing tenants are being told to get rid of their animals.
A more enlightened local authority is Wandsworth, which allows dogs if they are chipped and neutered. This should go a long way to quelling the explosion on housing estates of staffie and bulldog types being used to produce puppies, and then abandoned.
And if all this weren't bad enough, things are about to get a whole lot worse. Last week, the RSPCA confirmed it is no longer able to take in pets that are merely 'unwanted'.
Our largest, oldest animal charity - an institution that has long made me proud to be British, that has an income of 120 million a year - will now only be able to help in cases of abuse or extreme neglect.
The result? 'Pets will be left to fend for themselves or chucked on the motorway,' said Harvey Locke, the incoming president of the British Veterinary Association
Sidney: A real character, good-naturedI live with a dog who was chucked out of a car on a motorway - a very young staffie who, as well as having a broken leg, was covered in cigarette burns.
His owner, in all likelihood, tried to make him aggressive, failed and tossed him aside. He is the most affectionate and intelligent dog I have ever met, and my 17 cats use him as a pillow.
I have an old collie who was abandoned by the side of the road, and two collie pups - one of which came from Wiccaweys. (It's very hard to visit these places and leave emptyhanded.)
And, lastly, I have Jessica, a collie-German shepherd cross who was brought to me by her distraught owner, tearful small daughter in tow. Jess had spent 13 years with this family, but because they had lost their farm in west Somerset, and been assigned rented accommodation, they were not allowed to keep her.
I can only imagine what would have happened to Jess had she been less fortunate and placed in a pound. She is deaf, has cataracts in both eyes, is old and overweight.
My rescued dogs give me so much, and ask for so little in return.
All the dogs pictured on this page are on death row. They will be put to sleep next week unless someone, somewhere, comes forward to help them. Please, don't let that happen.
source :dailymail
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