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Irresponsible owners are to blame, not the animals
• I SEE we are starting out on the annual witchhunt regarding dogs in flats (Letters, April 16).
Not every dog owner is an irresponsible lout. We had a rescue dog, admittedly in a large flat, for 15 years. He is still missed since he died five years ago.
He was never allowed out on his own, he was always kept on his lead, he went for several walks every day and he was one of the family.
One day a Jack Russell ran out from some bushes and bit his face, resulting in a vet’s bill of £100 and the loss of his two front teeth.
I pointed out to his owner that it could have been a child’s face and she simply walked away laughing.
We were tempted to try to take legal action against her for failing to keep her dog under control but she was long-term unemployed.
It is not that a dog lives in a flat, or the size of the dog.
It is if the dog is being kept for the right reason.
The gangs of boys parading around the streets, parks and estates are not dog lovers but little men who like to have a big fierce dog to intimidate other people, you can see it on many estates.
Most dogs are not naturally aggressive, they are made this way by mindless morons.
The council are responsible for the people they are housing and it should not be beyond them to tell these tenants and their children that if they continue to keep fighting-type dogs, and in some cases to breed dogs in council flats, they will be evicted.
The first step should be a sensible dog licence at £250, all dogs to be registered at birth and to have passports similar to those required for horses.
Each dog to be routinely micro-chipped. Obviously there would need to be concessions for pensioners but not for the unemployed. There should be no haphazard breeding of dogs, dogs should not be bred in social housing.
At present dogs are being bred in tenants’ flats and frequently disappear only for a new pair of dogs to reappear after a few days.
Breeders should have to lodge a large sum of money with the local council and be required by law to ensure that any puppy from the Heinz 57 breed to the most expensive pedigrees are going to a suitable home before they are sold.
Random checks could be carried out to ascertain that the dog, the chip and passport all tally.
Sadly the reasons for people wanting a dog are not always the right ones and quite often it is possible to a line of people hanging around waiting for their drug dealers who frequently are accompanied by large dogs, maybe we should put down the drug dealers and keep the dogs.
V Murphy
Dombey Street, WC1
No warning signs are posted about dangerous dogs
• TOO often your letters pages have to have disturbing news concerning increasing numbers of heavy and aggressive ferocious breeds of dogs, and the harassment faced by many when faced with uncontrolled dogs on communal areas of council housing estates.
It seems wasteful for four-star Camden Council & Partners to spend £700,000 on a temporary Safer Neighbourhoods policing team arrangement, while ignoring community safety on their own properties which have notices, “Private Property, No Dumping, No Loitering”, yet no warning signs indoors or outdoors on dangerous dogs?
Recent changes to their housing management created four new posts for each district office, specifically to deal with anti-social behaviour.
So they would be well organised to enforce tenancy and leasehold conditions relating to dog harassment, if they had a sound policy.
Proposed dog control orders were opposed by Councillor Chris Philp when he wrote, as a dog owner, suggested it would be absurd to restrict walkers to four dogs at a time (Let dogs get on with their lives, Letters, April 19 2007).
The Gospel Oak councillor believed that proposals were too draconian, and urged the Conservative executive to adopt a common sense approach.
He also said: “We don’t want a dog enforcement regime that resembles the parking enforcement regime,” but he failed to state that he represents an area blighted by gang warfare, anti-social behaviour and dog nuisance in particular.
So the do-nothing, curry-favour-with-Hampstead-and-Kilburn-voters approach has failed.
Banning dangerous cross breeds, bulldogs and large dogs from certain areas could have been a logical first step in tackling the scourge of anti-social behaviour boroughwide.
James Redmond
NW1
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