Legislation and Dog Ownership
The topic of legislation and dog ownership is addressed every few years usually following a spate of dog attacks. The most recent of these, at the time of writing this, happened in Kent on Friday 8th July 2022 as described in the Metro.
The call for more legislation does seem to be society’s knee-jerk reaction when something goes wrong. Perhaps all that is needed is for existing laws to be enforced more.
There is already a lot of legislation in place regarding dog ownership. According to the Blue Cross, there are over 20 separate pieces of legislation.
One example is the introduction of compulsory micro chipping which was introduced in 2016 and covers the whole of the UK. This has provided some recourse when it comes to animal welfare and out-of-control dogs as it’s now much easier to track down the owner of a dog.
Despite all this legislation, there have been calls for the old dog licence scheme to be reinstated. One such call was reported by the Express in 2017.
Up until 1987, there was a dog licence which was part of The Dog Licence Act of 1867. The only part of the UK that didn’t abolish it in 1987 was Northern Ireland. You still need a dog licence there, though the requirements are different from the original one. Through the years the licence became very cheap to obtain and by 1987 it cost 37p. There were issues with the original licence.
The conditions of the old dog licence stated that all dogs had to wear a collar with a tag that had the owner’s details on it. If a dog was found outside without these, it was collected by a dog warden and the only way that the owner could get it back was to produce the dog licence. As far as I can find out, this was the only penalty for not having a licence. The licence was not there to ensure any sort of welfare standard concerning the treatment of the dog or the conditions that it was kept in. The costs of the administration of the licence far outweighed the revenue it created, especially as a good proportion of owners didn’t bother to get one as they were rarely asked to produce it.
So, given that the licence wasn’t much good in the first place, would it be worth reintroducing it? Are we just adding one more piece of red tape that will end up being meaningless and unenforceable?
Any new dog licence would, I think, have to encompass and enforce the existing legislation around owning and caring for dogs. It would have to set out exactly what was legally required of a dog owner. Part of the issue, I feel, is a lack of knowledge and understanding around caring for animals and what is legally required. Any penalties for breaching the licence would also have to be sufficiently robust and be a real deterrent otherwise it would only be seen as a token gesture.
Here are the sources I have used to research this subject:
http://shorturl.at/xKZ04 This is a shortened link to the Blue Cross.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/788396/RSPCA-question-microchipping-for-dog-licenses
The opinions expressed are mine and do not reflect those of Kelp Social or the other users.
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