Barking up the Wrong Tree

As with humans, there are certain dogs that I thoroughly dislike. Take the seemingly placid, pale fawn Labrador cross that lives in Plaza de Iglesia just a minute's walk up the road. This seemingly mild-mannered canine sits and observes passers-by as if butter wouldn't melt in its mouth, watching them dwindle into the near distance before lauching a lightning pursuit of snarls and gnashing canines. Or the small brown effort that hurls itself with audibly clicking teeth at my ankles whenever I pass through its territory... No, I do not like these dogs.

However, I myself am owned by a dog. Bruce has been in my life for almost three years now, since the day I rescued him, hours old, from a bag of household rubbish that had been tossed into a skip. Yes, that's right. He and his five siblings had been removed from their mother straight after birth and thrown live into a sack of melon rinds and other household garbage, then tossed into a container to smother or await death by maceration when the rubbish truck arrived.

Notwithstanding this narrow escape from a horrible end (that sadly claimed the lives of all his siblings), Bruce has matured into the most loving fellow imaginable. He adores people, has an endless appetite for fun, and likes nothing so much as to curl up into a little ball of dog on the sofa in a spot of sunlight, or on his very own quilt on the bed.

These anecdotes help to illustrate some of the canine related issues, not just in Alfacar but in Spain as a whole. First, the problem of perros callejeros - street dogs. The small brown effort that attempts to sink its gnashers into my flesh is not a true  street dog insomuch as she has an owner, but she is left to roam free for a large part of the day and therein lies the problem. There are many true ferals in Spain and they cause no end of problems, from killing livestock to interbreeding with the critically endangered Iberian Wolf, thus threatening the genetic purity of this iconic animal. It is unlikely that these dogs - and there are many - have ever heard of Barbara Woodhouse or the Dog Whisperer and as a result, they are also a serious threat to traffic, cats, ankles, and public health due to the amount of excrement and urine that they so lavishly deposit on the streets.

But don't blame the dogs, because Spain has a problem. Spain has the unfortunate distinction of being the European Union member that abandons more dogs and cats than any other. This shameful distinction can no longer be put down to traditional attitudes to domestic animals, because Spanish dog owners love their dogs every bit as much as the supposedly animal-loving English. And consider the growing number of refuges and animal rescue charities around the country, dedicated to rescuing and rehoming the carelessly abandoned.

However, the darker side of dog ownership in Spain is truly that - dark, horrid, sordid. Take the case of hunting dogs. Bruce is a podenco, one of the traditional hunting dogs of southern Spain. Leaving aside the moral maelstrom of hunting for now and focussing on the dogs, podencos are lithe, fast, prick eared and sharp nosed, and are reknowned for their intelligence.

Of course, there are many conscientious owners and breeders of podencos and galgos (lurchers and greyhounds) who ensure that Spanish law is complied with by vaccinating and microchipping their animals, and who keep their dogs in clean and happy surroundings. But for every one of these, there is probably at least one man - and it is men who hunt, after all - who regard their dogs as things, pieces of equipment to be kicked when they don't work, and thrown away when they are no longer needed.

Take the recent case of a dog farm in Murcia. When animal welfare rescuers were tipped off and located the spot, it was to find the place littered with the emaciated bodies of galgos and podencos that had starved to death; others were barely alive and tragically, it was not possible to rescue all of the surviving animals on this occasion. Consider also the fate of many unwanted podencos at the end of the hunting season. Countless thousands of them are rewarded by their "masters" by being drowned, shot, poisoned or throttled, their bodies no doubt dumped in some disused, forgotten well. Many are hung from trees; they even have a name for this, the typewriter death, because of the sound of the dog's scrabbling claws on the ground as it dies...

It is not my intention here and now to wonder at the inner workings of minds that will throw live puppies into a rubbish skip or slowly throttle a dog to death with as much indifference as they might toss a half-eaten burger into the trash. Nor do I want to single out Spain as being an especially cruel country. Consider, after all, the millions of dogs killed around the world each year for meat, for supposedly scientific research and out of sheer, raw sadism. But the next time that small brown dog hurls herself at my vulnerable ankles, I will remember that she and my Bruce are among the lucky ones. And part of me inside will weep at the magnitude of Man's betrayal of his erstwhile "best friend".