Die piggy, and keep well

“Like as Mahatma Ghandi (sic) always used to say, a country is recognised for what it is through the way its people treat their animals.” Yes, and I hope a department’s way of treating its animals is not recognised by its language. For if it is, it’s bad news indeed for the country’s four-legged creatures.

The Animal Welfare Department’s website (from which the quote by Gandhi is taken) is a rather intriguing species. It toadies on about director Mario Spiteri, who “puts in hard work and endless efforts”. It gives us an inventory of the department’s armoury: “two-way radio system, dart guns, catchers, extended pole needles, harnesses”, and such things you’d normally associate with an unlicensed sex shop at the bottom of a Belgian alley. And then there’s the story of the two samoyeds “blessed” by being “homed together by the Prison Juvenile Section”.

I really have no wish to read too much into a website. Nor am I interested in bashing the department’s work in an unqualified way. I’m sure Spiteri has managed very well the shift from making smokers’ lives unpleasant to making animals’ lives pleasant. I’m also positive the department spends most of its time doing things animals really, really like. Its mission, after all, is to see that “animal’s rights are respected”.

Such as, one assumes, the right to be chased after, darted, pole-needled, and harnessed. Sadly, if last week’s events are anything to go by, there’s one right that’s rather less respected. It’s called the right to live.

I wasn’t aware Ħal Farruġ actually existed. For some reason the name has always brought fond thoughts of books by Trevor Zahra, anthropology by Jeremy Boissevain, and big blue birds known in English as ‘Rollers’. If there were farms in ‘Ħal Farruġ’, they would be populated by happy families of goats, smiley pigs, pigeons, and dogs. With fantasies like these, who needs religion?

Until last Wednesday, when this bucolic dream of mine was rudely interrupted by a report in The Times online. Ħal Farruġ was a real place, I learnt, and there was at least one farm there. It was just as I had imagined it – rubble walls, makeshift doors, and the happy family. Except, it was also ‘illegal’.

No mere detail this last one, for it provided the Animal Welfare Department with a reason for a pogrom. Armed with long sticks and a lack of humour, it swooped down on the farm. The goats, otherwise looking as happy and well-fed as can be, were bundled into a truck bound, so one officer told The Times, for the abattoir. Two pigs, possibly the cutest I have ever seen, were dragged by their ears onto the same truck.

The unfunny thing was that all of this was done in the name of ‘animal welfare’. The Animal Welfare Department seems to believe goats are so big on bureaucracy they would rather bleed to death than live without papers. The goats’ opinion is not known at the time of writing. Nor will it ever be, given the life expectancy of animals at abattoirs.

This whole story brought to mind a host of questions about the Animal Welfare Department’s work. For starters, does a farm’s ‘legality’ have anything to do with animal welfare?

In principle, most certainly. I’m sure most farmers are perfectly decent folk who would never intentionally be cruel to their animals. I’m also sure, however, that there are a few who aren’t. These people cannot be trusted not to do such nasty things as drag pigs by their ears.

That’s why regulation, i.e. the law, is important. If anything, it makes possible inspections, among other things, that should ensure welfare standards are met. So yes, the Animal Welfare Department is right in principle to make sure all farms operate within the law.

There is, however, something called ‘common sense’. And it tells me consigning a herd of obviously well-cared-for goats to the Marsa bonfire just because they lack ear-tags doesn’t really square up. If the department were really into animal welfare, it would just fine the owner, issue the goats ID cards, and send them back to their idyll.

Some might protest that this would be very foolish, that food safety standards are all about ear tags and papers. Which is exactly my point. That is, that animal welfare is as fine a department as any other, only misnamed.

Destroying goats and pigs just because they are ‘illegal’ and ‘kept in dirt’ (as opposed to their luckier mates who are kept in single cream and rose water, presumably) is not about animal welfare, but rather welfare of a more human kind.

It’s not the first time this department has got on my nerves. Since being pole-needled to the libel courts is not my idea of fun, I’ll put this as a question: Is it true that Animal Welfare Department officers have of late air-gunned hundreds of pigeons at Mdina? And if that’s the case, are they about animal welfare or ‘pest control’ (there’s an idea for a new name).

There’s also something infinitely distasteful about the whole publicity business. Do we really have to look at pictures of Spiteri smiling and wielding a mean-looking dart gun? Do we have to watch every time the department swoops down on an unsuspecting herd of goats?

I ask this partly because triumphalism always makes me suspicious that the berg is being ignored for the tip. (You know, the old story about Chinese propaganda posters that ‘remember’ the 10 happy peasants and ‘forget’ the 10 million starving ones.) I’ve yet to see the department drag battery hens by their combs, or wage a dart war on cab (karozzini) horses. That may have something to do with battery hen farmers and cabbies, who could turn out to be less pleasant customers than some plonker out in Ħal Farruġ.

The film clips and hard talk are also very bad publicity. No matter how unhappy I might be about my neighbour’s relationship with his dogs, I know I would never phone Pest Control to sort it out. Those who think animals are better off dead than ‘living in dirt’ are free to do so.

mafalzon@hotmail.com