Thông tin tài liệu
Status Dogs 149 homeless, may relinquish their dog to local shelters or animal welfare organisations or, worse, abandon them The cumulative effect of recent legislative developments may yet serve only to damage the human-dog bond and might exacerbate the status dog problem For now we can rightly regard the dog as man’s best friend: despite the large numbers of dogs kept and the high proportion of these living in cruel situations, dog attacks on people are rare Interventions Calls for early intervention programmes emerged almost immediately after the rise of the status dog phenomenon in the UK The Associate Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare mini-report of 2008 reflected the growing recognition amongst animal welfare organisations of the value of education, training and awareness-raising as a means of preventing dog attacks and improving welfare standards NGOs such as the RSPCA commissioned several research projects, including Status dogs, young people and criminalisation: towards a preventative strategy (2011), to provide a platform on which to design such work But whilst an understanding of the merits of intervention for ensuring prevention is widespread, the notion that the evaluation of such programmes is critical to success is perhaps not Few of the main animal welfare organisations are able to provide a sound methodology or evidence-base for their programmes and whilst they claim to communicate and co-ordinate with each other to avoid duplication, in reality natural competition for supporters and donors has probably thwarted that ‘While there are an increasing number of projects providing information to young people, few are properly evaluated to determine their effectiveness’ (RSPCA 2012) Some models of intervention have been imported to the UK from the USA where they have since, however, been abandoned for being ineffective— as such the UK is perhaps trailing other nations Clearly, it should be acknowledged that traditional methods of evaluation are impractical in these circumstances as it is impossible to know how many people would have gone on to be cruel to their dog or how many dogs would have gone on to attack Also in defence of these programmes, it must be noted that there is no universally recognised method for evaluating intervention programmes in the animal welfare sphere Any evaluation must feature practical knowledge of dog behaviour and training activities—and government patronage has thus far only amounted to an inadequately funded paper exercise In practice therefore,
Ngày đăng: 24/10/2022, 10:45
Xem thêm:
