North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

The dog it was that died

Many years ago, when I was a kid, one of our neighbours discovered that their farm dog had given birth to a clutch of (unwanted) puppies. The farmer's wife promptly filled a bucket of water and drowned them. Her husband called her Hitler for a week. Even to this day, whenever I see a plastic shopping bag at the side of a river or bog-hole, my first thought is that it might contain yet another clutch of freshly discarded kittens or pups.

Karlin had an article in the Irish Times about so-called 'puppy farms' on Saturday (sorry. no link) - it follows the discovery of over one hundred dachshund puppies on a farm in Tipperary last week. There was no food on site and most of the pups were in cramped, filthy cages. The ISPCA effected the rescue and ten of the puppies made a guest appearance (along with their human minders) on the Late Late Show on Friday night on RTE1. Of course the whole country fell in love with them - who couldn't love cute little puppies?

The reason for such puppy farms is that the dogs are raised for the pedigree market abroad. To be honest, the plight of a small number of sausage mutts seems a relatively trivial issue, particularly compared to the treatment of other animals. Actually, if we just stick to dogs, Ireland's biggest canine cash crop is the greyhound. The greyhound has been a part of Ireland's culture for as long as we've been telling stories in this country - Cú Chulainn anyone? - and greyhound racing is still an immensely popular sport. Alas, the life of a greyhound is truly the survival of the fittest. If you think that there is a retirement home where wizened old dogs mutter I could have been a contender, then I've got two bits of bad news for you, and the second is that there ain't no tooth fairy either.

What happens to the slow dogs, or the lazy ones ? For them and the old dogs, it's nothing but a hard road. Officially, many dogs are exported to either the UK or Spain. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd imagine that those countries are only interested in the fast ones. Even then, the normal way of disposing of an unwanted hound in Spain is literally to string it up and leave it. There is also a growing export market of dogs from Europe to Vietnam (where I imagine the last words many of the dogs would hear are do you want chips with that?). In any case, I can't help feeling that for many greyhounds, for the runts in the litter, their fate is not a whole different from the unfortunate puppies on my neighbours farm all those years ago.

Posted by Monasette at February 2, 2004 11:28 PM