The law on animal welfare and the suffering of a symbolic dog. Animal rights activists: extinction is better. The fans riot. The minister: no to unscrupulous breeders
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN — The goal of the law is noble: to prohibit the suffering of animals, not just domestic ones. The result is that it could lead to the ban, and extinction, of one of the quintessential German dog breeds, aka the dachshund. In the background, yet another cultural war between those who want to legislate, protect and regulate animal life and those who believe it is only an interference of the State (and of the new “right-thinking”) in consolidated habits.
The Ministry of Agriculture directed by green Özdemir Cem published the guidelines in February. We want to prohibit so-called “torture breeding” and practices that generate breeds with genetic characteristics that condemn animals to degenerative diseases. For example, no more cats without ears, pugs that can’t breathe, pets without hair, but even cows cannot always be tied up in the stables. Now, the long-bodied, short-legged dachshunds they are among the animals with “skeletal anomalies”, because the excessively elongated shape of the back often leads to hernias, discopathies, movement difficulties in old age. And, although the wording remains vague, if it were confirmed, its restrictive reading would lead to a ban on the breeding of dachshunds in the future.
It was the Association of German Dog Breeders (Vdh) that reported the case, starting a wave of protests. «We protect our dachshunds from the intrusion of ideological forces. A common front is required,” wrote Josef Ramacher, president of the Deutscher Teckelklub born in 1888, the oldest in Germany. The petition has reached 22 thousand signatures.
Teckel, Dackel, Dachshund (badger dog): three names for the same breed which the English instead call, amicably, “the German sausage dog”. And although today it is only tenth among the favorite dogs in Germany, it has at least 400 years of history behind it. Napoleon, Emperor Wilhelm II and Pablo Picasso (the owner of Lump, who appears stylized in several paintings) carried him in his arms. It was the mascot, with “Waldi”, of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Dachshunds are also at the center of a famous Walt Disney film which was shown on TV every Christmas, where in truth everyone was rooting against them, and for the gigantic and naive Dane Brutus.
As for the bulldog English (another breed at risk of being banned for some time), the origin of the health problems of these animals are the increasingly widespread crossbreeding created in the last century. In late 19th century photos the dachshund has longer legs and a shorter torso. Animal welfare put at risk by humans: there is enough, in our changed sensitivity, to raise infinite questions and unleash opposing extremisms. Peta’s animal rights activists believe that the only “legal” dachshunds should be those that come out of municipal kennels, meaning that the only way to not make them suffer is to make them extinct. The green minister Cem, no: he assured that the law only wants to stop unscrupulous breedersand that no one, certainly not him, dreams of touching the German dachshund.
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March 29, 2024 (modified March 29, 2024 | 08:43)
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