Subject: All Animals Are Scapegoats

September 2003

By: Neil Mcintosh

Some people are very quick to blame animals. When a child visits the doctor and is diagnosed with worms, it is often easier to say the cat must be responsible than to dare suggest improving toilet hygiene at school.

When a teenager starts wheezing at night because of asthma it is much simpler to dump the poor dog, who must surely be the cause, than to consider the effect that an ancient old pillow, packed full of house dust mites, might be having.

Of course. this kind of anti-animal attitude is not new. During the Bubonic Plague epidemic of 1666, many believed the disease to be spread by cats and dogs and so they were slaughtered in their thousands. Unfortunately it wasn't until 1898 that a scientist, Simond, discovered that 90 per cent of humans were infected by being bitten by fleas that had fed on infected rats.

Rats that, naturally, had flourished after the cats and dogs had been exterminated.

There are more modern examples of Blame-The-Pet hysteria. During the recent SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, samples were taken from 25 animals at a market in Shenzhen, in Guangdong Province on the border between Hong Kong and China.

When the SARS virus was found in a civet, a racoon dog and a Chinese ferret badger, it wasn't long before the Agrifood and Veterinary Authority of Singapore started trapping and killing cats, even though tests on 140 samples proved negative.

Unfortunately, however, some of the Pro-Animal-Whatever-The-Situation-Brigade are just as bad. Last week, in Tufnell Park, three miles north of the centre of London, a four-year-old girl was bitten on the arm by a fox as she slept in an upstairs bedroom. Some time ago I predicted this would eventually happen if we continued to entice these wild animals into our gardens with food, thus reducing their natural fear of us.

On this occasion, the resulting newspaper coverage should have given a number of organisations the chance to get across a sensible point or two. No such luck.

Trevor Williams, director of the Fox Project, which runs an information line on urban foxes, suggested the fox was likely to have been a juvenile, searching for new territory.

Oh well, that's all right then. Foxes do like to live upstairs don't they?

Even worse, Yvonne Taylor, spokeswoman for the Edinburgh based Advocates for Animals, said that the fox could have been sick or injured and that the vast majority of foxes had more to fear from humans than the other way round.

Is it too much to ask for a little bit of common sense from both sides?