10/24/2013

We make laws....



...And  later on we either break them or abide by them, depending who are affected, it is absolutely disgraceful what is happening in this country with regard to animal rights laws. There are just a few but even those few are not being enforced. Something as simple as the obligation of being able to identify dogs, cats and ferrets using microchips, nobody is watching if this law is being enforced and every day we find thousands of animals abandoned on the streets or roads without any form of identification. It is incredible but still over 80% of the animals coming in to our refuge do not have this identification chip and I ask myself: if this was the case with cows what would happen then? I really don’t understand because we do know exactly how many cows and sheep there are in this country, and we are able to identify their owners if any of them gets lost  but in the case of pets it is not the same, it is clear that the authorities are not interested at all if the law is being enforced or not, and what even shocks me more is when we find some animal that does have a chip and we denounce it, the denouncement ends up being passed from one place to another until who knows where, they don’t have any idea about the laws nor do they want to know, not the state security, nor the administrations nor  the judges, it is a form of apathy that to me is unbearable.
I will give you some examples; Aida, a female Doberman which was left with a serious scab problem with 2 veterinary reports, with a chip so we know who the owner is and we have reported him about a year and a half ago and nothing has happened, at this moment we did not even receive any information on the status of the case.
Xena, an English bulldog with chip and we reported it with the chip number in the police report, stating that the owner is from Cataluña and the only thing the court needs to do is to send a request to the Catalonian database  to give them the name of the owner, and they don’t even bother to do so, and 4 days later the case is acquitted by the judge of the magistrate court nr 2 in Medina del Campo, and I ask myself what law this judge has applied to close the case without even bothering to find the name of the owner, or do judges get to choose which laws can be applied and which not?  In that case maybe I can also choose which taxes to pay and which not. And we have heard of the dismissal of the case only by chance because we were not informed either, according to them because they don’t need to do that.
We have picked up and reported various cases more of dogs of all types and colours,  I also remember the case of a pickup in Salamanca, the owner was from Salamanca, we send an email to REIAC and when they could not find the owner they put the dog in our name, which is illegal because you just cannot do it  if the previous  owner doesn’t actually  renounce the ownership, we have some more that were picked up with chip and reported, but we are still awaiting the moment where any of the administrations informed us of how the case is going. Like I said in the beginning, we make laws but we are not bothered to apply them.
Therefore we have gotten in touch with a animal rights lawyer because we cannot condone these kind of actions, never mind by whom, nobody can just choose whether to apply a law or not, or you abide by all of them or you retract them, but this free interpretation is not possible in law. We will keep you informed if and when we are getting something done on this.
Kisses, hugs, bites and loving licks, Fermin