Claire Black: The phrase to keep in mind when judging a dog is ‘deed not breed’

I regularly encounter dog walkers who turn on their heels when they see me and mine, others choose just to glare at us disapprovingly.

I won’t lie, I don’t always take it well. I know my dog – she’s sweet and sociable and that’s despite having been found as a stray and ending up in a pound. It’s tough that people won’t give her a chance.

But then again, I understand something of their nervousness. There’s a man I often see when I’m walking my dog. He has two staffies to my one. Mine is off the lead, with a frisbee or a stick in her mouth, always on the lookout for another dog to play with. His are stockier, one male, one female. They strain at the end of their chains. I’ve never seen them play.

His dogs and mine are the same breed but there the similarities end. The phrase to keep in mind when determining whether a dog is dangerous or not is “deed not breed”.

In the UK, there are 210,000 dog attacks every year, a shocking figure. Last week, Jade Lomas-Anderson became the sixth child to be killed by dogs in homes since 2007. The 14-year-old was at her friend’s house in Wigan when she was savagely attacked by four dogs, believed to be a bull mastiff, an American bulldog and two Staffordshire bull terriers.

In Scotland the legislation to protect us against dangerous dogs is far better than south of the Border. The Control of Dogs (Scotland) Act 2010 means that local councils can issue dog control notices (DCNs) to owners if an animal is consistently out of control. (There had been numerous complaints from neighbours about the dogs that killed Jade, but no law through which any action could be taken.)

DCNs are intended to be preventative – forcing owners to muzzle or neuter their dogs, banning them from public spaces or making them attend training courses. Breaching a DCN can lead to a £1,000 fine or a ban from owning a dog. In extreme cases the dog could be destroyed or the owner jailed.

That seems right to me. Owning a dog is a huge responsibility; they require affection and care, of course, but they also require discipline, structure and routine. In addition to legislation dealing with dangerous dogs, we need a greater emphasis on training for owners as well as their dogs and a clampdown on unscrupulous breeding.

It’s interesting to know that as many of us are shivering in our homes and wondering if we’ll ever actually be able to switch the heating off, the five top executives at Centrica, the owner of British Gas, collectively received a total payout of £16.4 million last year. Set that against new research that shows that one in six children live in a home that is either inadequately heated or damp and those multimillion payouts look not just outrageous, but morally indefensible.

Silly old Ben Fogle. It turns out that the presenter has been promoting tourism in a region with one of the world’s worst rates of deforestation. Oopsy. There he is gawping at a cute little orang-utan in a promotional film for the Sarawak Tourism Board, while spectacularly failing to mention that the state is responsible for the rampant destruction of the little fella’s habitat, exporting more tropical logs than Africa and Latin America combined.

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