Animal Lovers Web Blog

More often than not as I am sat going about my business in the study I have the constant companion of background radio, usually talk radio as my taste in music is rarely well served by the daytime music channels and I find it less distracting. Every now and then though, the words strike home and the background noise becomes compulsive listening.

This happened to me this morning whilst listening to the Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC Radio 5Live when she had studio guest presenter, Ryan O’Meara managing director of the well known dog magazine K9. The reason that the listening became compulsive was the amount of sense that he was talking about how to increase the levels of responsible dog ownership in todays society.

The debate had been triggered by a call by the RSPCA to be given greater powers to punish the owners of dangerous dogs, which is fair enough, but I tended to agree with Ryan O’Meara that rather than than just beating unfit dog owners with a bigger stick after the event that a better and more effective solution must be to improve the education for dog owners and would be dog owners.

He even went so far as to say that some form of assessment of an would be dog owners suitability to own dogs should be introduced and that this should involve some form of dog test assessment before qualification is granted. Victoria Derbyshire then asked him to come up with five questions that may be typical of a “responsible owners dog test“, you can see these questions for yourself and have a go at them in our dog discussion forum, I think you will agree that they are pretty difficult.

Difficult though these dog questions may be, I think few could argue that by learning to answer questions such as these we would all become much better informed dog owners and that could only be a good thing. I think his idea was to have an assessment procedure similar to that for obtaining a drivers licence, which is not too unreasonable if you think about it. You need to prove that you are capable of being in control of a potentially dangerous vehicle, so why not for a potentially dangerous animal?

Obviously, no one in life wants even more hassle, assessments, red tape, legislation or bureaucracy but if it led to better dog owners and through this better behaved and safer dogs then surely it is a target worth striving for?

John

Animal Lovers Web.com

After a long wait we have finally managed to collect our two rescue piglets from the Scottish SPCA rescue shelter in Balerno, Scotland after coming across them in a Google alert. The poor young piglets, part of a litter of seven, had been waiting for several weeks for us to be able to collect them, as the RSPCA had delayed doing an assessment of our facilities to approve us to have the pigs.

It was a long drive to collect them as the shelter is almost two hundred miles off so we went up the night before and stayed at a friend’s. The next morning, armed with a large wire meshed dog crate and a bag of straw for bedding, we set off with excitement but also a little trepidation, as we didn’t know exactly what size piglets to expect or how they would cope with a 200 hundred mile car journey!

The wait for the piglets turned out even longer than expected as we had some difficulty finding the rescue centre and we went round in circles, albeit in some lovely Scottish countryside, before asking a local farmer who pointed us in the right direction. At long last we got there and one of the staff welcomed us and said “would you like to see the piglets the then?” -  would we? Too right we would!  Although, before actually meeting our piglets we were taken to meet the parents. The parents had been part of a circus petting zoo before their rescue and the piglet’s mother is a pretty pink-with-black-spots Kune Kune sow named Fiona. Their father is a black pot bellied boar called Shrek, a real handsome chap. The litter of piglets were all either all black like their father or pink with back spots like the mother.

Then the wait was finally over and we went to see our piglets. They were in a brick outhouse with a walled off concreted yard and the first we saw of them was their little black snouts poking up out from some straw. They look gorgeous but a little apprehensive as they had just had their ears tagged that morning, which were probably still a little tender and I’m sure they were thinking “Oh no, what are they going to do to us now?”  Our first impression was that they were much smaller than we had expected but they looked really cute and gorgeous.  Now we were sure that the dog crate that we had bought specially was more than big enough for them. In fact, they were going to look a little lost in it. After meeting them and taking some pics and videos we had to go off to the office and complete all of the paperwork. This involved giving our DEFRA holding numbers and there is a pig transportation form that has to be completed when pigs are moved, we had brought this with us. With the boring bit out of the way it was off to load up our piglets.

This was when the squealing began, as soon as one of the staff tried to catch the piglets they both squealed like banshees. The first piglet stopped squealing as soon as she was caught but the other piglet squealed at the top of her voice all the way to the car. As soon as they got in the car they settled instantly and just tried to bury themselves under a pile of straw. So off we set on the long journey home. Before very  long before it became clear that one of the piglets had had a bowel evacuation…what a smell!! This is not a smell that you want to experience at too close range, like cooped up in a car! With the windows all lowered and sun roof open we proceeded and then one of the piglets must have become car sick as it started to go the way a dog does just before it vomits and sure enough, proceeded to empty its stomach contents as well as its bowel. You can imagine how the car smelled by now! We had to make a stop and throw in a lot more straw which neutralised the smell to some extent and then called for an emergency care air freshener.

The rest of the journey proceeded without incident, apart when we stopped for a break and a snack which we ate in the car, to keep an eye on the pigs, and with the smell we nearly joined the pigs in throwing up!

Anyway, finally we arrived home with the two gorgeous piglets intact and we introduced them to their new home. While they are so small we are keeping them in our dog run which is ideal having an indoor sheltered area and an outdoor grass run. They seem to like it although are more than a little timid at the moment, it seems they are pigs by name and guinea pigs by nature! But we’re sure our piglets will soon become tame.

You can see a little video of us collecting the piglets below.

John

AnimalLoversWeb.com