London - Dougie the border collie has just cost his owner Phillip Pook a small fortune. Dougie was in the newsbecause Mr Pook had been taken to court for placing an electric shock collar round his pet’s neck.
Mr Pook lives in Ogmore-by-Sea, South Wales. Electric dog collars were recently banned in Wales by the principality’s Assembly.
Mr Pook was found guilty by magistrates in Bridgend and ordered to pay £2,000 (about R22 000) plus £1,000 costs. If I restate the particulars of the court case in a bald way it perhaps serves a purpose. When printed in black and white, the matter does sound unpleasant, does it not?
An electric dog collar? Yikes, you say, that sounds like something from the torture chambers of the KGB. The casual bystander may say: “Serves the man right.” Mr Pook was found by the bench to have broken the Assembly’s new law. The law must be upheld. Take him down - or at least take his money.
In addition to being a country of laws, we are a country of pet lovers, particularly dog lovers. I am very much a doggy sort.
But here is my confession: I use electric collars on my dogs. Indeed, I recommend them. I sincerely believe my dogs are happier as a result.
Terrible though Mr Pook’s actions might sound, and terrible though you might think me for using such devices, the matter of electric dog collars is not as cut and dried as it might seem.
The Daily Mail’s splendid legion of animal-loving readers will already be removing pen tops to send me steaming letters of protest, so let me try to get in my reassurances first.
I have always been mad about dogs. As a boy, I was besotted with our family pets and was desolate when they died, as they have the unfortunate habit of doing.
We lived by a busy road in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, and cars regularly drove in and out of the grounds of the school my parents ran.
Four of our dogs were run over in 13 years - one of them by the post van when she was heavily pregnant. As a seven-year old, I thought my world had ended. I also remember sobbing uncontrollably into my mother’s apron when our shih tzu, Tiggy, was squashed by a car in 1976.
That year’s summer may be remembered by most people for its drought, but for me it’s memorable chiefly for that incident. Tiggy was a small bundle of snuffly fur, but to me she was everything. When she died, I howled.
Scroll forward three decades and my wife (who is such an animal lover she stops at the roadside to try to rescue flattened pheasants) and I were keen for our children to grow up with the same appreciation for pets.
So when a friend appeared at our Herefordshire home three years ago with an unwanted Patterdale terrier named Flick, we were unable to resist giving the one-year-old bitch a home.
She had been bred as a hunting dog but was, we were told, no good at going to earth (chasing a quarry into a burrow or den), so she had been discarded. Though he had saved her, our friend was unable to accommodate Flick. Could we help?
One look into her gooey, chocolatey eyes and we were suckered. Of course we would have her.
She has been with us ever since and, of an evening, will demonstrate her appreciation by licking our faces and laying on our shoulders, wagging her stumpy tail.
We renamed her Flip (it sounded less aggressive) and she was soon the object of complete adoration by our three children, Claud, now 14, Eveleen, 12, and Honor, eight.
However, there were early difficulties. On a walk by the Wye in the first week, I let Flip off her lead briefly and she shot - whoosh! - into some woods and down the nearest rabbit hole. So much for her not being any good at going to earth!
After an hour’s search in the gathering dusk, I heard a scampering and whimpering from a nearby mound and managed to pull her out of the hole. Lesson learned, but only up to a point.
The next week, Flip eluded our sight and made her way into the garden of our neighbours, John and Margaret, who are retired farmers.
John has some much-prized hens. Let me rephrase that: he had some much-prized hens.
Flip, exploring her new territory exuberantly, said hello to them in characteristic terrier fashion. That is, she bit their heads off. Chomp. One bite. Headless chickens. It was, to say the least, embarrassing.
Luckily, farmer John is a fine Christian and, after a bottle of whisky and appalled grovelling from my wife and me, he forgave Flip.
Further awkwardness ensued when Flip ran off and joined a local shoot one afternoon. I do not shoot, but apparently she proved a pretty good retriever. So we were told by the man who dropped the little scamp back to us that night. She had made a nuisance of herself, but country people are pretty understanding.
The incident was a further illustration of how hard it was going to be to control Flip. We tried to train her. Hours were spent trying to get her to sit, walk to heel, answer a summons and drop objects. We consulted library books. We watched that TV show about dog training. We talked to friends, vets, experts.
Patterdales, alas, can be as stubborn as cats. The training was not wildly successful.
Our house is next to farmland. We were worried about Flip getting into a neighbouring field that’s used for grazing. Might she worry the cows? One kick from a heifer would surely kill her.
Then we heard about DogFence. This is a battery-equipped collar that responds to signals from a buried perimeter wire. When the dog approaches the wire, the collar starts to make a noise. If the dog goes closer, the collar emits a small electric shock. You alter the power of the shock according to the size of the dog.
At the risk of sounding like Max Mosley-ish sado-masochists, my wife and I experimented with the device on our wrists. The shock was not much more than a sudden tremor.
The collar was an instant success. Patterdales may be naughty, but they are not dim. Flip quickly worked out that if she approached the edge of our two-acre garden, her collar would reprimand her.
You could see her experimenting. She would slowly approach the edge of our garden. The collar would react. She withdrew. As a result, she has the freedom of our garden, running around like a dervish, doing what dogs like doing, such as exploring molehills, chasing birds and pursuing their own shadows.
The alternative would be to lock her in a kennel during working hours and allow her to exercise only when we had her on a lead.
Flip has since had a litter. We kept one of the puppies, a bitch called Bonnie. Flip has done well with her training and will respond to my whistling. Bonnie, being adolescent, is less obedient.
She’s improving, but once or twice she has escaped without her collar and ended up halfway along the lane. The electric collar protects her. It keeps her out of the road, away from the traffic. It keeps her well away from those cows, not to mention our neighbours’ livestock. Yet it gives her the freedom to roam her domain.
Is this so very wicked? Is it the behaviour of animal abusers? Does it merit heavy financial penalties? I don’t think so, but the likes of the RSPCA and the Dogs Trust do.
They were delighted by the impoverishment of Mr Pook for his alleged cruelty to the handsome (and, from photographs, perfectly happy-looking) Dougie.
Are these animal welfare groups really protecting dogs? Or are they perhaps seeking to impress us with their political posturing and urban swagger?
Not speaking dog, I can’t be entirely sure, but I’m pretty certain I know what Flip and Bonnie would tell them. They would think the whole matter was, in a word, barking. - Daily Mail