In my discussion with Mr Kannan from AVA, I was told that in his years serving with the centre, he has never received any official complaint or report on someone abandoning his pet. He mentioned that yes, people do write to the Straits Times' forum to talk about pet abandonment. But till date, there is no record of pet abandonment, or so he informed.
And if that's the case, why does AVA then launch full campaigns on responsible pet ownership explicit with the educational message for owners to take responsible ownership of their pets and NOT abandon them or shelve them away?
Surely, there must be very valid reasons why an organisation would even bother launching full campaigns on this. If it is not the official figure that there is NO pet abandonment in the records kept by the Centre for Animal Welfare and Control Division, then what is it? Are govt. campaigns then motivated by forces of subjectivity or abstraction, where it is hard to put your finger to something, but that you do know that this something exists, even though you have no numbers to back it up.
In this respect, isn't pet abandonment an issue roiled with subjectivity because animal-human relations is hardly objectively quantified and that pet abandonment, concretely speaking, is an act that can rarely be tangibly proven.
Say, a mother dumps her baby at someone else's doorsteps. There ARE people who know that the baby belongs to her. Based on the reasoning that there are witnesses to prove the baby belongs to the mother, and that the baby couldn't possibly walk itself to those doorsteps, the mother IS guilty for discarding her child. Of course, this is just a 'hypothetical' scenario.
Yet, for Junior's and Ginne's case, where there ARE people so dead-sure that they belonged to the family and that given a mere week, these two dogs couldn't traipse their way to the remotest part of the island on their own in one piece, why then is it so hard to see the direct link between two abandoned dogs and a family thay once owned them? Is it hard to (re)think logically and humanly?
I've heard enough of pet abandonment cases: owners tethering their dogs to trees and driving away, owners releasing pet rabbits into the wild from pet carriers, owners dumping pet dogs at construction sites in the middle of the night, people strategically placing a box of kittens at the doorsteps of caregivers and fosters in the silence of the night.
Unless every corner of the world is installed with a CCTV, there is no way anyone can record the entire motion of someone releasing his dogs into the wild and driving away. Even if it's a captured picture, the image fails to show the entire sequence of dumping. Even if there are eye witnesses, the defendant could say they are lying. Even if the dog is microchipped (and microchips are known for their traceability in tracking errant dog owners), the owner could just say "My dog ran away." Pet abandonment is riddled with so much subjectivity that I find it hard to pin "evidences" to a real-life case. And if so, what evidence do I need?
Junior expresses her love with affectionate mouthing. I'm sure the owner knows that.
Ginne is a real beauty and has a penchant for guy owners.
As hard as we had worked to render as much justice to these two dogs who were left out in the cold during the monsoon season and were subject to culling, road dangers, starvation and poisoning (Ginne could have been put down had we missed a day), I cannot come full circle in forgiving myself for my "miscalculation" in having them adopted to the family.
But with good faith, I believe justice will prevail for the dedicated, the faithful and the kind. If you'd like to improve the lives of Junior and Ginne, and fill up the lapse that a well-deserved justice did not quite fill, pls email projectjkteam@yahoo.com.sg
We are in need of funding for their lodging and medical expenses. And in need of hope to carry us through even tougher times.
1 comment:
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly with you that a law that has no bite against pet abandonment really does little to address the problem.
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