NGO Defends Sporting Dog Owners

1 June 2010

The NGO today defended owners of sporting dogs in a robust response to a Defra consultation about dangerous dog control.

The consultation, started by the Labour Government before the election, had suggested compulsory microchipping and insurance for all dogs, an expense the NGO said was completely unnecessary for dealing with the issues surrounding  genuinely dangerous dogs, largely confined to urban areas and gangland.

The NGO's full response to Defra reads:

A Response to Defra's Consultation by the National Gamekeepers' Organisation

The National Gamekeepers' Organisation (NGO) has nearly 15,000 members, most of them dog owners, and it represents the gamekeeping profession throughout England and Wales.

Gamekeepers rarely, if ever, have experience of the increasing problems caused by dangerous dogs and status dogs in urban areas that lie behind this consultation. Very occasionally a gamekeeper may feel threatened by a dangerous dog accompanying a poacher he encounters during his work but this is a rare event and we believe existing law is sufficient to deal with this eventuality. We do not, therefore, have comments to make about the proposals being made to tighten up the law as it relates to the control of dangerous dogs in urban areas and gangland.

The NGO's concern with the consultation is much more to do with the potential impact of some of the proposals it contains on legitimate owners of well-behaved, safe dogs.

For self-evident reasons, the highly trained working dogs used by gamekeepers and other members of the countryside community are some of the best controlled dogs there are. There is no history of such working breeds being dangerous to people. There is simply no case for changing the laws or rules that affect such dogs on grounds of danger to the public. We have serious concerns, therefore, that some of the proposals in the consultation are for changes which would appear to do just that.

Paragraph 53 of the consultation lists a number of 'other options' being considered by Government - 'other' in this context meaning ideas that go beyond changing legislation specifically relating to dangerous dogs.

One of these options (number (5)), suggests that all dogs should be compulsorily insured for third party liability. Another (option (6)) that all dogs should be microchipped to aid traceability. Both of these options would impose mandatory and expensive burdens on literally millions of owners of completely safe, normal dogs. We oppose them strongly. Some dog owners may indeed chose to insure their dogs or to have them microchipped and there can be good reasons for doing both. But to impose such actions as a legal requirement would be a dreadful example of state interference with people's free decision-making and, in the context of the safe, normal dogs owned by our members and millions of others, would do nothing whatever to help solve the specific problems being caused by truly dangerous dogs. These two options should be dropped altogether.

Another option (number (4)) suggests the introduction of Dog Control Orders (DCOs), which would enable a police officer or local authority representative to serve a dog owner direct with a "control notice" where the owner had failed to properly control a dog. This control notice would in turn allow an officer to require a number of remedial measures including keeping the dog muzzled when in public, keeping the dog on a lead when in public and arranging for the dog and owner to undergo training. Some of this may make good sense but it needs qualifying. This consultation is supposed to be about  dangerous dogs - the ones that threaten human safety. Providing new powers where an owner has simply 'failed properly to control a dog' could open the floodgates to the issuing of DCOs to all sorts of people whose dogs an official deemed not to be properly controlled. If this proposal is to go ahead, it needs to be much more tightly linked to dangerous behaviour by dogs, not just bad behaviour in the eyes of a policeman or other official.

The rest of the consultation is indeed about dangerous dogs and dangerous dog legislation and we have no comments to make on that as it is not our area of expertise.

We hope these comments from the NGO will be of some use to Defra in considering its next steps on this matter.