Barking Up the Wrong Tree

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200 – August, 2015

–About Animal Welfare Issues –

By Attila Márton

Animal welfare is an integral part of modern society. The major aspects are usually the problem of stray dogs and animal cruelty. These elements often cause lengthy and deep-rooted debates mostly between the breeder society and animal welfare activists. And from time to time you get the feeling it is a neverending struggle without real benefits or achievements. The hard to answer question is: for what reason?

No matter what part of life you are talking about, if you want to achieve something new or change something old, you need a strategy to succeed. A planned strategy with clear goals, thorough research, an action plan, monitored execution and feedback analysis to see if your plans work in reality, not only on paper.

Strategy with all its attachments and tools has a major impact on the end result, whether you are launching a new product, starting up a new company, or handling some kind of social issue, including animal-related matters.

All effective strategy starts with properly defining the desired end result. You just need to decide what it is you want to achieve, or how will you know when you have achieved what you set out to accomplish. Goals such as world-peace and saving dolphins, without exact definition and description, are just empty words.

When you have defined your aim, you need to examine the environment you have chosen where you want to bring change, analyze the current situation and consider all the effective actions you have to trigger to achieve that goal. At last, when all the mental work is completed, you act! During and after this implementation you analyze whether your ideas during the planning stage actually hold up in real practice. Feedback and analyzing results are essential. All these steps are important and if you leave anything out, it could have a completely different result from what you anticipate. This pattern will be true of anything you need to change. And why does all this management nonsense really matter? Because merely having good intentions and the simple desire to change the world is not enough!

To move the world from “A” to “B”, you have to possess deep knowledge and close analysis of the current situation; you have to define your final destination clearly, and you must have the competence to know the path that leads there. Otherwise, you are lost! All your research needs to be followed by full analysis based on the facts. Many things are based on speculation. But to build up a strategy on speculation alone is like starting to build a house. In order to build a house you need not just the desire to build a house, or willing people to help, but you need expertise, materials, and above all, plans, because it’s no good if one person makes the walls or windows different dimensions to those used by everyone else. Everyone has to work together in accordance with the plans to achieve the desired results.

The most difficult and complex phase of all is to analyze the related environment to comprehend clearly all the connections between the factors you want to alter. Is dog breeding really responsible for the overpopulation of dogs? If you think so, ban it. Will it solve the problem of crossbred dogs on the streets? No. So no matter how easy it is to form such an idea, it does not contain truth or the desired outcome. As you probably know, animal cruelty is banned in most developed societies. Does legislation put an end to the problem? No. To eliminate or to reduce it, you need to find the root of the problem. The very reason why it exists. When you give money to a homeless person, do you probably help his or her life? Yes, for a short time. For the time that amount of money lasts. And after that? If you fight against these kind of social issues as a whole, besides fire-fighting to minimize the damage, you have to fix the situation of each individual permanently and find a way to prevent others from going onto the streets and into that downward spiral. And when you only give a coin every day, ignoring prevention and real problem-solving, the deep underlying root cause will escalate and result in more serious problems; and one day you will see more and more homeless people on the streets.

People usually concentrate on the surface issues and want to eliminate the state or situations that can be perceived directly. But this usually does not affect the root of the problem. Without addressing that, the source of the problem is still active, even if you can make a visible change. Sooner or later, the problem will reappear. Surface changes always look good initially, you feel like you’ve done something, but really nothing has been solved. Moreover, all the money, time and the positive intention of completing something important diverts your attention from seeing that while you were acting on those surface issues, nothing happened deep down at the root-level. So the factors that trigger the things you worked to eradicate still exist and in all probability are still freely growing… So you can see that only concentrating on short-term gains or improvements can be really dangerous. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the situation you want to heal or improve is a very complex one and you are absolutely incapable of handling it. But because you feel the urge to do something good, you just start to do something. Which is not enough, and can even do more harm than good in the long run.

However, aiming at short-term achievement is really popular. The simple reason is the nature of it. You have immediate feedback, or feedback after just a short while; you can see the result of your efforts and you can see it works. Conversely, using and conducting long-term strategy is likely to be a ‘covert’ operation when you cannot really present the effect and as time goes by nobody is aware of the change because it happens slowly, often taking years or even a generation before any real change is visible.

The above-mentioned examples are related to problem solving. But there are more hidden, less noticeable ways of handling social problems, and this is often through prevention. If you employ methods of prevention, you do not need to wait for something to happen. You take steps to avoid the situation and by these actions, you do not have to wait until any harm is done to address the problem.

If you look around in the arena of animal welfare issues, you can see on a daily basis that all these topics are really timeless ones. Shelters are full of abandoned dogs, tortured and sick animals. But you can also see constant tensions between different organizations or dog-related segments of the society. And if you examine this over time, you can also see that nothing much has changed over the years. And yet there have never been so many organizations dedicated to making a better world for our beloved four-legged partners as there are now.

What is the problem then? Why isn’t it working?

Think now for a minute about the meaning of the phrase ‘animal welfare’? Can you come up with a definition that is an accurate description of everything we mean by this term? If you want to do something for animal welfare or even fight for it, it is essential you know what your aim is, and to do that you need to know what animal welfare actually means. The most detailed definition is probably the one you can find in the glossary of CAROdog (CARO stands for Companion Animal Responsible Ownership) as follows:

‘…how an animal is coping with the conditions in which it lives. An animal is in a good state of welfare if (as indicated by scientific evidence) it is healthy, comfortable, well nourished, safe, able to express innate behaviour, and if it is not suffering from unpleasant states such as pain, fear and distress. Good animal welfare requires disease prevention and veterinary treatment, appropriate shelter, management, nutrition, humane handling and humane slaughter/killing. Animal welfare refers to the state of the animal; the treatment that an animal receives is covered by other terms such as animal care, animal husbandry, and humane treatment.’

The problem with this definition is that it contains further terms which require consideration; terms such as ‘safe’, ‘comfortable’ and ‘able to express innate behaviour’. All these terms are ‘as indicated by scientific evidence’. But as we all know, science is developing day by day. So is this definition changing as well? Just to pick up on two specific areas, you will be very much aware of the huge advances that have been made in the field of DNA research over the last decade. And the science of the psychological health of dogs is a brand new area which has seen huge breakthroughs in recent years, as we humans have begun to have a greater understanding of how dogs perceive our world, how they learn, act, react, interact, and in the case of any temperament issues, what is the best practice to solve these. Who, therefore, can really say exactly when a dog is safe, comfortable and able to express innate behaviour? Or even using plain and more general terms: when is a dog ‘happy’ and ‘kept well”?

Animal welfare is a more complex topic than we might readily admit. You can separate it into many different major parts, and I highlight major parts. As these major parts can themselves be divided into further divisions.

The most common animal welfare activities are usually related to animal rescue. This is the situation where there is an attempt to rehabilitate abandoned animals, to bring them back into human society, by finding them a new home. Animal rescue is a really demanding and very important process, where you can see clearly the cruel end-result of animal cruelty and abandoned dogs. As it is very visible, animal rehoming always gets all the attention. But it would be wrong to think that is all there is to animal welfare.

Luckily it is becoming more widespread to ensure not just the physical, but the mental rehab of the dogs as well. Rescue only takes care of the physical wounds, but rarely prevents the way injuries happen. So what is the real cause? Does rehoming one dog prevent others from being abandoned? If you only concentrate on rescue, you pick up one and help just that one, and in the meantime, two others end up on the street. That is why activists can easily suffer from burnout, since in spite of their struggle, they only see more and more dogs who desperately need help. If you can’t find the way to eliminate the ‘resupplying’ of abandoned dogs, all this is just tilting at windmills.

The other term of the animal welfare family is animal rights. Law is always important, but it is a commonly misunderstood area. And I do not mean just understanding the law itself, but its implementation and effect on society. Law is a framework about how to do and how not to do something. It can be – where it is well-written and adaptable – a really good tool. But the problem with legislation is that banning on its own is not the final solution. You can ban animal cruelty, but just because it is legislated, doesn’t mean the problem immediately vanishes into thin air. It is important to begin with legal support. However, it is just a tool and must be adaptable to the society it serves. Law alone solves nothing. You can often hear: ‘we have done everything that is legally required’. And if that does not work… well, that is someone else’s problem.

Animal health issues is a separate and rapidly developing area. Its scope mostly covers or should cover the complete well-being of the canine species. Both physical and mental well-being. This is a most misunderstood area. Until recently when we thought about animal health, we only considered genetically transmitted diseases. Genetic research is rapidly developing, and we have discovered more and more about illnesses, especially those related to genetic defects. These disorders may be controlled, or by selective breeding and animal care, might even be eradicated altogether. This is where human responsibility comes under scrutiny. Breeders in particular can be culpable.

Have we covered all health issues if everything is okay genetically with our dog? No, not at all. What about overweight dogs, because they are just so cute with their sad eyes begging for more food? What about breeds that need lots of activity but are kept in a small flat? And the list of things that dog-keepers do not consider as harmful to his or her dog’s health could go on ad infinitum.

The term which is probably the hardest to define is animal protection. It is not an individual activity, but the mixture of action and attitude that can cover any or all of the activities mentioned above with the aim to maintain the welfare of animals. If it only covers animal rescue – as it is mentioned above many times – that is a false idea and very harmful in the long run, no matter how good the intention.

This is only the theoretical side of the whole topic about the welfare of dogs. If you compare this with everyday life, you will certainly see significant differences. It is just impossible that one organization can cover every aspect needed to make a better world for our beloved four-legged friends. To make things even more difficult and complicated, dogs and dog-related issues are linked to many different segments of society including dog keepers, breeders, animal welfare activists, vets, politicians, many non-profit organizations. All these parties have different perspectives, ideals, goals and interests. It is a general rule that different interests can become the source of massive conflicts. Many times, instead of communicating, trying to understand each other and working together, they simply fight each other. That is probably the biggest enemy lurking unseen in the whole struggle. As a pocket watch cannot operate with a missing cog-wheel, neither can a complex welfare system operate without all the parties concerned working together, listening to each other, making compromises, keeping in mind their common aim: the welfare of dogs.

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Posted by ralbee on Aug 23 2015. Filed under Current Articles, Editorial, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.