Funny old world in a country that might be going to the dogs

I found myself telling old friends the other day, when they asked about Harry, that more than ever he had become a member of the family; he seemed increasingly human with age.

Someone quipped that perhaps with the passing of the years we were becoming more "doggy", too.

There may be something in that - though I'm not sure exactly what, and felt better of inquiring as to the exact import of the remark.

After all, there seems to be more than just sport in the game of predicting the personalities of people from the nature and breeds of their pets (should you be wondering, Harry is a 10-year-old golden retriever).

So a safe, unthreatening relationship from a comparatively cosy world in which people love their pets and, so they like to imagine, vice versa.

Reading the news of late, one could get the impression that an alien virus had infected the world of dog-people interactions, lacing both parties with a rabid and moronic malevolence.

Take the case of the Gisborne man who fed a litter of kittens to his dog for sport; the various dog attacks, by Neapolitan mastiffs, bulldog-pitbull crosses and pitbulls; and the horrifying episode in which 33 dogs were slaughtered in an old quarry near Wellsford, north of Auckland.

They do not speak well of the state of canine-human relationships.

We have yet to hear the full story of the Wellsford "massacre" - peppered as it appears to be by contradiction, unsavoury behaviour and unanswered questions, such as why was a man living in an old truck in a disused quarry allowed to have 33 unregistered dogs? - but something akin to the truth will eventually come out.

Nonetheless, the story has fuelled debate about pets and the propensity of people to be devastatingly cruel to them.

Coincidentally, National MP Simon Bridges has a private members Bill which proposes an increase in maximum sentences for animal cruelty from three years to five, which Prime Minister John Key seems to have put his weight behind.

On the one hand I'm all for it - partly because there seems to be reasonably solid evidence that people who are cruel to animals tend to be violent towards people, including vulnerable members of society, women and children.

They seem to lack the capacity to empathise or recognise the pain or terror inflicted upon their victims, instead taking a perverse and macabre pleasure in it.

And because it simply seems inhumane and uncivilised to mistreat, beat, torture or kill pets for no good reason at all.

On the other hand, the tendency of the Government to embrace whatever happens to be the populist flashpoint of the moment is becoming somewhat predictable.

Why is it that dogs, and other animals, attract the sort of response that would do St Francis of Assisi proud, but when it comes to cruelty and violence towards women and children as a society we just we sort of hang our heads, and avoid metaphorical eye contact, as if to say "it's complicated"?

A couple of years ago, Green Party MP Sue Bradford put forward an amendment to a law, the aim and effect of which was to abolish the defence of parental discipline in cases of serious assault against children.

We have not heard the end of it yet from those who contend that the state has no business litigating against the behaviour of parents towards their children - which of course is plainly nonsense, since society does that in all sorts of ways already.

Regardless, it's a funny old world in which might be construed to be OK to beat your kid with a cane, strap, stick, rubber hose - you name it, the disgraceful annals of child abuse in this country are full of it - but in which, at a stretch, you might get a spell in prison for doing the same to your dog.

Thanks to Ms Bradford the defence no longer exists.

But back to the matter at hand.

Is the country going to the dogs, and what, if anything, should we be doing about it? On balance, harsher penalties for the mistreatment of animals is a positive move.

But it should not remove the obligation to address the complex set of social circumstances that engenders the "mongrels" who seem to believe they can inflict terrible violence and cruelty on animals and people alike.

There, got that off my chest.

C'mon, Harry, time for a walk.

Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.