Any breeder or dog owner who cares about their dogs will NEVER donate any of them to the SAPS if they know what will happen to them. If they cannot keep their dogs then they should approach breed and other rescue groups (who do not euthanase) for help to re-home them - preferably directly from their home. If a good home can’t be found then it would be better for a dog if the owner has it euthanased by a private vet. No strangers treating him badly or being frightened, lonely and hungry in strange places and later killed in a mass euthanasia programme.

1) Dogs donated to the SAPS are kept alone in rows of cement kennels about 3m X 1m.

They are fed a certain fixed amount of dry cubes but there is almost no monitoring as to how well individual dogs do on these rations. Dogs are allowed to get grossly underweight (as much as 20kg is very common) before the dog is taken to the vet for a check-up and put on bigger rations. The result is that most of the dogs that we’ve bought from the SAPS have been thin and some literally starved. Again the last year has been the low-point. We frequently spoke to the SAPS vet and there were brief improvements but the basic problem of determining how much food individual dogs need is still there and dogs are still being underfed and starved.

They are ‘tested’ to see if they will do obedience, attack-work or retrieving.

Up until September this year the SAPS auctioned off to the public all the dogs who failed these tests. (These included dogs that they bred as well as dogs donated to them.) Pet Link-up has been to every single one of their monthly auctions for the past 5 years and so has become very familiar with the whole procedure. We out-bidded most dog –dealers and security companies (who used to pick up dogs for R50 before we came on the scene), and came home with up to 25 dogs a month, which we trained and re-sold to private homes. The number of dogs auctioned off per month was usually between 30 and 40.

From the start it was clear to us that the SAPS’s ‘testing’ of dogs is not very good. They rejected dogs who were excellent and who we quickly trained to do obedience, attack-work and tracking. The metro police bought dogs once from us that we’d bought at the SAPS auction and only had for a week. They are still operational police dogs today. (We did not sell dogs again to them because their intended policy of allowing dogs to go home with their handlers was not implemented.)

In the last year it has been very clear to us that the SAPS has hit rock bottom with their testing and training. It seems that most of their handlers have left for Iraq and massively higher salaries. Those remaining have made such bad attempts at testing and training that brilliant dogs are conditioned NOT to work and less confident dogs have been cracked. Most of the dogs who we’ve bought from the SAPS in the last year have had psychological and emotional damage as a result of their ‘testing’. Bloodhound cross Dobermans that the police have bred specifically for tracking and that are outstanding for the purpose, fall down on the ground and scream when a lead and chain are put on. We take those same abused dogs and within a half an hour they are tracking like professionals. It’s taken some of them a year to get less frightened of strangers though. We have belgian shepherds and cocker spaniels (bred by the SAPS) that still run away from strangers after longer than a year.

2) Because of this lack of knowledge of how to work with dogs, we can only predict that most of the dogs donated by the public, and those still bred by the SAPS, will fail their ‘tests’ and be found ‘unsuitable’ and given to the SPCA. With their current media campaign the number of dogs that this might involve could be a couple of thousand (depending on how many the police can take in). The SPCA can only euthanase such a large number of dogs – especially given that this is the time of year when they are usually overrun and euthanase dogs after only 4 days. Last year a spokesman for the SPCA said that 5,500 dogs and cats are killed every month just in the Johannesburg area. To give an idea of the public’s response to the SAPS’s appeal, the silverton SPCA says that they have been inundated with phone calls from people asking them whether it would be a good idea for them to donate their dog to the police. Fortunately they are advising people NOT to, but how many other people will donate dogs without checking with anyone whether it would be good for the dog? Another reason why the SPCA will euthanase many of the dogs is that many of them are nervous wrecks after the SAPS ‘testing’ and after being isolated in a small cement kennel and underfed for the time that they have been there. The SPCA does not work with the dogs that it gets in and nobody will adopt a frightened dog that runs away from everyone. Some of the dogs we’ve bought from the SAPS have taken months to socialize, others have not come right completely after a year – especially those dogs bred by the police themselves who have never had a loving environment.

The SAPS have flatly refused to consider giving ‘unsuitable’ dogs back to donors, or to spread them out amongst breed or other rescue groups to try to re-home. This is despite the fact that they know that Pet Link-up has successfully re-housed up to 25 of their auctioned-off dogs every month for the last 5 years, and that Border Collie Rescue have helped us re-house the border collies amongst them. They also know that the SPCA do not allow dogs to go from them to other rescue groups, and so the masses of dogs rejected by the SAPS will congest the SPCA and, as said, most likely be euthanased. It is more convenient for the SAPS to dump the dogs on one doorstep. They are certainly not concerned about the fate of the dogs. As far as they are concerned they are, quote, ‘unwanted state property’ that must be ‘disposed of’.

3) This, by the way, is what retired police dogs are considered to be – ‘unwanted state property’ - so after years of loyal service (much of which will be spent in isolation in a small cement kennel, with no comforts or family life) a dog can look forward to … not a golden paw-shake, but to be dumped at the SPCA and on death row. At that age nobody will adopt him, so he will be killed without further to-do in a mass-euthanasia. No thanks. No good-byes. Would any dog breeder or owner want this for their dog? Even if he is accepted as a police dog, this is what his retirement package looks like.

This is, of course, if he has been a police dog, or prison dog, or worked for SARS etc. in SOUTH AFRICA. Dogs found ‘suitable’ can also be sold to governments of other countries. This means that they could go to African lands above us (like so many hundreds –maybe thousands - of dogs sent to security companies there over the last few years) or even Iraq (where many thousands of dogs have been sent already). In other African countries the knowledge of dogs and their health is often very poor, with dogs neglected and dying unnecessarily. In Iraq the climate is so hot that dogs die from overheating if out of their air-conditioned kennels for long. Their working lives there are short and end with a bullet (unfortunately mostly from their handlers’ guns) if the sun doesn’t get them first.

4) The SAPS say that they are continuously trying to eliminate corruption in the dog sector and have recently implemented a central records system to keep track of all their dogs, including dogs donated to them. It is our skeptical opinion, however, that there is still a good chance that dogs can be slipped ‘under the table’ to private individuals or security companies, as has happened in the past and as is possibly happening right now while people are being trained to use the new system.

What about the multitude of dogs country-wide that policemen will have to inspect to see if they should be accepted for testing? What control will be kept to see that dogs removed from donors actually go to the police? Will the SAPS give each donor a letter of receipt after arrival of their dog?

The bottom line is that when someone donates a dog to the SAPS, it is the same as that dog getting lost– you will never know what happens to it. It’s actually worse than that. At worst the dog can end up in the worst possible places that it could when it goes missing. At best the dog will have a lonely life and heartless end. At least if he gets lost he might end up in someone’s home with someone to love him and pleasures that make life worth living.

Susan Spencer, Pet Link-up, 20/11/06

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