Dangerous Dogs

I want to talk about two aspects. The first is dog fighting. The second is some of the success that Hammersmith and Fulham council is having in combating dangerous dogs in general. I have already referred to an Adjournment debate that I had last May on dog fighting. At that time, Hammersmith and Fulham faced a crisis given the amount of dog fighting and ancillary activity that was going on in the borough. The phenomenon has been around in London for a long time. It probably peaked about a year ago in my borough and came on to my radar screen about three years ago. It first arose from a chance encounter with the chairwoman of the Clem Attlee, Maton and Rocque tenants association, which represents one of the largest estates in Fulham, who mentioned the problem to me. At first, I was surprised and genuinely taken aback that this mediaeval practice could be going on in what is not one of the poorest London boroughs. I was told about pre-arranged dog fights on the Clem Attlee sports pitch. It struck me as being extremely strange and dangerous. Not only did it take out of action a precious community facility that is much needed on the estate, but it created a danger to both humans and dogs. As it turns out, the dog fights turned out to be relatively rare, but an awful lot of behaviour connected with dog fighting causes enormous difficulties in local communities. The problem was not only organised fights on the sports pitch, but intimidating activity before fights, which involved dogs being lined up inside and outside the pitch area to snarl at each other and to prospect for a fight in the future. At first, I thought that the problem might be a one-off that was restricted to the Clem Attlee estate, but following further research I found that it was happening in various places across Hammersmith, including the White City estate, the William Church estate and De Palma court. Partly due to the good work of Hammersmith and Fulham federation of tenants and residents association, I also found out about a couple of dog-breeding factories in my constituency, one of which was discovered in Adam walk and the other in Flora gardens. A lot of criminality and unpleasant behaviour surrounds dog fights—for example, gambling takes place. Sometimes the dogs are traded, and they can fetch between £1,000 and £2,000 on the secondary market. Many of the fights are recorded, which is the canine equivalent of happy-slapping, and the DVDs and videos are sold around the place. The training of dogs for fighting causes grave damage to community facilities. Such dogs are generally trained in parks and woodland, and one practice involves hanging a dog from a tree in a effort to strengthen its jaws for fighting. If one went to Wormwood Scrubs, or even to Ravenscourt park in Hammersmith, a year ago, one would have found a lot of damaged trees that had been used for training dogs. Dogs were even hung from the horizontal crossbar of children's swings. I am no expert on play equipment, but I imagine that that can only have done harm to play equipment in addition to its being an extremely intimidating activity for anybody using it. Furthermore, the practice is extremely harmful to the psychological and physical well-being of the dog. Fortunately, Hammersmith and Fulham council introduced a full set of dog control orders last year, and I have been told that they have been extremely effective. Our council takes the phenomena surrounding antisocial behaviour extremely seriously, and, as with almost everything else involving the council, things have improved enormously in the past two years.