Page 919 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 30 March 1993
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It is virtually impossible to free ACT citizens from attack or fear of attack from dogs. While we have dogs, that risk will always exist. In many ways the dangers of dogs are taken for granted. For instance, we tend to focus on hunting and fighting dogs as being the greatest threat, and that is probably fair enough. Yet all dogs have fangs and all dogs bite. They bite for all sorts of reasons. Even the quietest dog can bite.
Madam Speaker, the only way to free citizens from the fear of attack from dogs is to keep dogs off the streets, to stop them roaming freely. They should be confined to the backyard, and when exercised, taken for a walk, they should be on a short leash. I personally believe that those that are of an attacking kind should be muzzled. I would at least like to have this avenue explored. I am a great believer in prevention being better than cure. Maybe here we can do two things at once. Maybe we could solve the problem by giving dog control jobs to some of those people that are now engaged otherwise, such as, for instance, the paper picker-uppers, and give their jobs to the youth unemployed. It is simply not worth the risk of having anyone, let alone a young person, being bitten and scarred for life. Fines will not stop dogs biting or attacking. Keeping dogs on a leash will not stop them attacking. Impounding them will not rehabilitate them. It is too late after the dog has attacked.
I believe that the solution rests with the owners, and owners simply must become responsible for their dogs. They must be made to be responsible if they cannot take that on themselves. All dogs simply must be registered, and the fines for not doing so must be heavy. I would like to see all dogs, and indeed cats, identified by a microchip. This is encased in silica glass. It is about one millimetre by two millimetres. It is inserted painlessly between the shoulder-blades. It cannot be seen. It is permanent and it is biologically inert. Breeders use them and the pound has equipment to read the inserted chip to identify owner and address. This is a virtually foolproof way of registering a dog and making the owner accountable. The action to take against dogs that attack should simply be, in the first instance, to identify whether the dog is registered. If the dog is not registered it should be put down immediately. If it is registered it should be impounded until action is determined. Madam Speaker, we will never totally free people from the danger of dogs while we have them, but we can certainly be much stricter in the way we keep them.
Finally, Madam Speaker, we must increase community awareness and knowledge of the various breeds of dogs so that people really know what they are taking on when they acquire one, for whatever reasons. I believe that Petcare have a book that they are making available to schools and which lists those breeds of dogs that are more likely to attack than others, and maybe we should educate the people more widely. We have to educate the people to realise that little cuddly, fluffy pups grow into adult dogs, often with different characteristics. They also lose their appeal and often become neglected as a result. This can and will result in behaviour problems that can lead to the problems we are talking about today.
This is obviously a matter that requires the cooperation of the whole community, and I am sure that we can have that. Personally, I would love to have a dog, but I believe that it is neither fit nor fair to leave it alone all day, or alone when one goes on holiday. If we could get all the people to be more considerate it would certainly have a large impact on the number of dogs that people acquire and, as a consequence, the number of attacks would decline.
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