Critical Consumer Pat Sidley
This is a sad tale about a dog called Gatting, named by his owners, the O’Keefe family, in 1990 after cricketer Mike Gatting, who was supposed to be heading up a cricket tour.
The O’Keefe family’s three young children were attached to the dog, a highly pedigreed labrador with an unfortunate tendancy to roam.
Trying to avoid the consequences of the roaming, and protect his emotional and financial investment in Gatting, Brendan O’Keefe had the dog’s ear tattooed. He also had a computer microchip installed in the dog; with the right scanning equipment, anybody who found the dog could easily find out the identity of the dog and his owner, and the owner’s whereabouts.
Alas, this was not to be. When the family was away overseas last year, Gatting used the opportunity to put in a misguided bid for freedom. He was found in Rosebank (a swish shopping precinct in Johannesburg) by a woman who became very attached to him. The dog was eventually sold to her by the SPCA which had been asked to find its owners.
When the O’Keefes returned and worked out what had happened, they tried to get the SPCA to disclose the name of the woman to whom they had sold the dog (Gatting had by then quit wandering as he had been neutered).
But the SPCA would not bend its rules and the O’Keefes repeated claims to their distressed children that they would get the dog back had to be changed to soothing noises to calm the bereft children (Justine, aged 12, and Bridget-Clair, aged 8, were particularly attached to the dog) who will not see Gatting again.
“Unfair,” dog-owners may scream. “Sue the SPCA, get the name and sue the woman to get the dog back!” they may yell.
That’s just what the O’Keefes did — and lost. In the Rand Supreme Court case, which ended last week, Judge Pieter Schabort (the judge who co-chaired the Kempton Park constitutional negotiations) vindicated the SPCA’s view.
That view — the SPCA said it could not, under any circumstances, divulge the names of the people to whom it sells dogs which are in its care — is far from as cruel as it sounds. If they gave out that information, the SPCA said, “few people would risk offering a home to stray, ill-treated and unwanted animals if they knew that their adopted animal could be taken away from them once they had formed an emotional attachment to it and incurred various expenses on it.
“If they resisted the animal being taken from them, they could become embroiled in costly litigation,” the SPCA told the court — a view the judge accepted.
Some 37 000 dogs annually are housed by the SPCA around the country. In the Johannesburg area, around 39 percent will end up being “put down”; and 38 percent will find new homes. Of all the strays brought in (as opposed to dogs brought in by their owners for one reason or another), just under 30 percent will be reunited with their owners.
If new owners thought their pooches could be reclaimed when a previous owner caught up with the dog’s whereabouts, the euthanasia numbers would shoot up.
But there was another legal issue at stake which Gatting’s owners had contested, and which the judge did not accept.
At the heart of that issue was ownership. Gatting’s owners believed that in law they still owned the dog and the SPCA did not have the right to sell it. The judge found the O’Keefes did not prove their case. The law cited in judgment is intended to ensure that when a dog is apparently abandoned, it can be either sold by the SPCA (or similar organisation), or euthanased.
The SPCA would have been required to wait a few days and then would be able to dispose of the dog, one way or the other — a right the court upheld. Besides other considerations, to wait indefinitely would cost the earth; the SPCA already spends around R30 a day on each dog it houses.
So what about the SPCA’s duty to find the owner? After all, Gatting had all the right equipment.
Here’s the lesson for consumers: Gatting’s microchip was outdated technology, according to the SPCA, and the chip could not be scanned. Moreover, his tattoo was illegible.
So for consumers seriously attached to their dogs, or breeders with heavy investments who do not want to lose money through a straying dog which is eventually euthanased, Jack Collingsby of the SPCA in Booysens has some advice:
* Get a collar with a disc that contains the dog’s name and the owner’s name and whereabouts.
* Invest in an inserted microchip — but make sure you are dealing with a reputable company.
* Find out how large the data base is of the microchip company: the one that the SPCA is hooked into has around 100 000 dogs and their owners listed on it.
* Check with your vet, SPCA or similar organisation before investing in a particular microchip.
* Learn the O’Keefes’ unfortunate lesson: if the dog strays, chances are you will never see it again. It will either be euthanased or given away. If it is one of the lucky ones, running into the arms of someone like the Rosebank lady, you will have almost no recourse through the courts to reclaim the animal.