Ennvironment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Written evidence submitted by Stephan Toth

Having browsed through these documents, there is only one area of concern that I would like to raise.

10. Subsection (5) extends the rights of enforcement officers (for example, a local authority dog warden) to seize dogs from both public and private places if it appears to such an officer that the dog is dangerously out of control.

I have an issue with this because I have experienced cases where Westminster City Council dog warden along with two special police constables tried to fraudulently issue me with a fixed penalty charge for having my dog off of the lead.

At the time I was clearly outside of the dog control area according to a map on a nearby block of flats and the map on the councils website.

The flippant attitude of the dog warden was for me to accept his fraudulent penalty charge and then sort it out in court.

My highly trained and socialised Belgian Shepherd bitch is my only family and if this same dog warden pulled this unethical stunt again and then tried to seize my (family member) dog, there would most definitely be a subsequent very serious breach of the peace.

Especially if the warden came from a culture or religious background that were commonly known to seriously hate dogs.

I think this power should be reserved for official police officers only and not entrusted to local authority employees who may very well be placed by their employers on an unofficial performance target quota and especially if that service had been contracted out to a private company.

I can see that this clause will cause a lot of controversy and inevitably become very expensive to run when it comes to appeals and claims for compensation.

Also there is a health and safety issue here, if one considers a street thug with a 38 kilo bull mastiff conditioned trained to be aggressive and attack, the dog warden would not be equipped to deal with an ensuing situation where the thug sets the dog on him and then runs off. So the armed police would have had to been called by the warden to deal with the situation anyway.

Yes, the more I consider this issue the more I can envisage unscrupulous dog wardens avoiding the dangerous dogs and targeting Innocent dog owners in order to achieve their targets and causing a lot of upsets and distress to weaker members of society in the process.

April 2013