A Bad Law
We continue to operate our rescue in the context of the very bad legislative amendment enacted in 2023. A new and very ambitious update to the animal welfare law in Spain was passed in January 2022. The law itself includes training for dog owners, penalties for animal cruelty, prohibition of puppy farming and sales of pets in pet shops. All of this is totally laudable and
necessary. However, the PSOE Party (Spanish Socialist Workers), the senior partner in the coalition government, subsequently proposed an amendment to the law to exclude hunting, working and guarding dogs. The amendment was approved in 2023. Commentators say the PSOE initiated the amendment fearing reactions from rural voters.
The Royal Hunting Federation is said to have 337,000 members and hunting estimated to be worth €5 billion to the Spanish economy. As our followers know, Scooby is situated in the region of Castilla yLeon where all dogs, prior to the amendment, were considered equal, all deemed to be pets. Therefore the same animal welfare legislation applied to all dogs. The PSOE amendment excluding hunting dogs converted a dog’s status to ‘cattle’, lowering welfarestandards in the eyes of the law for dogs. In Spain, an estimated 100,000 hunting dogs are abandoned every year. Many of them cannot even be rescued and end up dying in inhumane ways as the victims of road traffic collisions, on train tracks or thrown down deep dry wells in the countryside.
There was a huge campaign in Spain in 2022 against the legislative amendment. It had three main messages for the Government: first, all dogs should be equal in the eyes of the law; second, a significant volume of rescue work is carried out by the charity sector; third, international animal lovers are absorbing Spain’s displaced hunting dogs. We continue to bring this the attention of the Government via our occasional meetings with the General Director of Animal Rights. It is very important that we continue to lobby for a change to the law to make all dogs equal.
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