Dog Fighting

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) for raising the issue of organised dog fighting. It is a barbaric activity, which has no place in a civilised society. Parliament first passed laws to stop it in 1835, and it is a sad reflection that nearly 200 years later we are still debating the same problem. In many cases, dog fighting is associated with other crime. Organised fights can be highly organised. People may travel hundreds of miles to attend, and large sums of money are placed as bets on the outcome. Fighting dogs may change hands for £1,000 to £2,000. Recordings of fights are often made, and may be supplied to people who either take perverted pleasure in watching animals suffer or are in the business of buying and selling fighting dogs and need evidence of their ““gameness”” to keep their price high. There are worries, too, that pet dogs are being stolen to be used in the training of fighting dogs, and I should like to thank the Dogs Trust and others for raising public awareness of the issue. Robust laws are in place to deal with any form of theft, but the loss of a dog always causes immense heartache. I urge dog owners to be vigilant and to make sure that their pets are kept in secure areas as far as possible. I join the hon. Gentleman in applauding the work done by the police and the RSPCA in investigating and prosecuting offences related to fighting. I recognise, too, that a lot of effort, particularly with regard to intelligence gathering, has to be put in to bring the culprits to justice. Recently, the issue of dogs being bred for fighting has been given media attention following the tragic death of Ellie Lawrenson on 1 January after being attacked by a pit bull-type dog in Merseyside. As hon. Members know, dog fights normally involve pit bulls, and the keeping of such dogs is banned under the Dangerous Dogs Acts. The action taken by the police in the wake of Ellie’s death to combat the keeping of pit bull-type dogs, which included an amnesty that resulted in 107 dogs being seized, has confirmed that a significant number of those dogs are still held illegally. They are kept for a variety of purposes—not just fighting—and I would not want to draw any rushed conclusions as to whether the problems that have occurred in Merseyside indicate that dog fights are about to become as commonplace as they were in the 1980s before the Dangerous Dogs Acts came into force. The hon. Gentleman highlighted a number of his constituents’ concerns about problems in his area. I have not had the chance to reflect on them, but my initial response is that many of the problems that he outlined sound illegal. They would, in my view, be illegal. If they have not been reported, they should be reported both to the police and the RSPCA. He said that in many cases the police, the RSPCA and his local street wardens had already taken effective action in Hammersmith and Fulham to help to tackle the problem. He said that pit bull terriers were exercised in communal gardens and spaces. The mere possession of such dogs is illegal, so if that phenomenon has not been reported to the police already, I suggest that it should be. If he has not already done so, he may wish to seek a meeting with his local police or, indeed, the Metropolitan police, to press his view that dog fighting and the keeping of illegal dogs should be taken more seriously. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that dog control orders had been, or were in the process of being, introduced by his local authority, which I very much welcome. Those are new measures that the Government introduced to help local authorities clamp down on problem dogs and problem dog owners in a particular area without having to go through too many bureaucratic hoops and loops. He mentioned the problem of blinged- up Staffs outside Fulham Broadway—I think that that is how he described it—being walked after dark as status symbols. One has to be careful—and he alluded to that later in his speech—not to blame the dogs themselves. Staffs are a perfectly legal breed, and many people tell me—like the hon. Gentleman, I am not a dog owner—that they can make extremely lovely, loyal and well-behaved pets. In the wrong hands, however, they can be intimidating and unpleasant for bystanders. The fact that they are dressed up may be a fashion statement but it does not, in itself, cause offence. Obviously, if the dog then causes problems or the owners behave aggressively, that may contravene the laws to which I have referred. As the hon. Gentleman mentioned, there has been a decrease in the number of prosecutions brought for pit bull ownership under the dangerous dogs legislation, but I would expect that to happen after the Acts were passed. In the immediate aftermath, more prosecutions would be brought in relation to pit bulls and pit bull-type dogs than in relation to other species.