Elvira Meucci-Lyons aims to rid our cities of dangerous dogs with good training and lots of TLC. Can it work?
The scene is the bleakest of cityscapes: Well Street Common in Hackney, East London, on a grey, grey day. A young man in a tracksuit, hood pulled up, walks across with his big bulldog-type pet pulling hard on her lead beside him. Most people would swerve to avoid them, or at least drop their eyes. But not Elvira Meucci-Lyons. She skips up and says: “Hello Angel.” She is talking to the dog but its owner cracks a broad smile.
No sooner has Meucci-Lyons introduced herself to man, Luke, and dog, Qasar, than she is trying to find out if there’s anything that she can do for them. She’s a woman on a mission: to stop the scourge of dangerous dogs in urban areas. Not so much hug a hoody, as hug a hoody’s dog. As head of campaigns and community at the charity, Dogs Trust, she launched City Dogs a year ago. She says that it was prompted by “a series of headlines in which people were talking about dangerous dogs and not analysing the real problem”.
“The media always focuses on attacks and there was a lot of talk about handling the problem of dogs and youths from an enforcement point of view,” she says. “People seemed to want draconian measures and we felt that a more educational and holistic approach was needed.”
Meucci-Lyons does not deny that these dogs are potentially a threat. After research, however, in London, Manchester and Liverpool, the Dogs Trust found that there were two distinct groups of young men (and it is almost exclusively men) who favour these powerful dogs. There is, she explains, “the general group from 16 to 29 who choose their dogs for street cred and then there’s the slightly older lot who use banned breeds or powerful crossbreeds for dog fighting and trading in public”.
“ We don’t want to mix the two groups up. The ones who breed or train their dogs for fighting are criminals and not the type of owners that we can reach,” she says.
So who can they reach? “We work with big dogs in urban environments that require extra care and attention. Our typical clients are young males, between 16 to 30, who live in an environment that necessitates them looking like they can look after themselves. They want a dog that reflects what they like to think of themselves: I am not to be messed with.
“A bull type or Staffie cross looks powerful and gives them credibility just like a pair of trainers might.”
Meucci-Lyons’s first port of call was Hackney council to whom she proposed a pilot scheme. Initially reluctant, for fear of being seen as soft on a tough problem, Hackney agreed. A year after the launch, a spokesman says: “We have worked with the Dogs Trust to encourage responsible dog ownership in the borough. They’ve held more than 50 events — in schools, youth clubs, on estates and in open spaces. More than 1,500 people have received advice from experts, 250 dogs have been microchipped and 50 dogs have been neutered. We are encouraged by how many dog owners actively seek advice.”
And seek it they do, either at events such as today’s or by word of mouth. The biggest single revelation has been that, like any other dog owner, these youths love their dogs. Julian, a jobless alcoholic, and Oscar, a Staffie cross, are City Dogs regulars. “I heard about them through a mate and got Oscar chipped for free; that was a good start because my worst fear is losing him or that someone will pinch him. He is anxious when I am not around, but someone could still obviously pick him up and throw him in a car.” Asked what Oscar means to him, he says: “I do like a drink myself personally, but he comes first in my life. He is my best friend 100 per cent.”
However, for all the evident love between him and Oscar, Julian feels the opposite from the wider public. “A lot of people give me a wide berth. They see him and go round me or even cross the road. People naturally assume he bites, he doesn’t.” That said, Julian did have trouble controlling Oscar, especially when there were “lady dogs — I don’t like calling them bitches” around. “One time, he bolted across the road and I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t be having this; if he got splatted by a car I wouldn’t be able to cope so I got him done and he has simmered right down. If anything, all the boy dogs want to rump him.”
Neutering isn’t just a matter of helping dogs to calm down though. There are only four breeds of dog that are illegal in the UK: pitbull terrier, Japanese tosa, dogo argentino and fila brasileiro. If a dog is a crossbreed suspected to have one of those strains in the mix, the police can seize it to determine if it is prohibited. However, even if it is found to be a banned breed, the dog can be returned to the owner if they comply with certain conditions, including chipping and neutering.
A nother visitor to the Well Street Common event, Bobby, is happy to talk about free training and chipping for his eight-month-old Staffie cross, Brandy. But “chopping his balls off?” He’s not so keen on that idea. Louise Glazebrook, a dog trainer and behavioural specialist who works with City Dogs, tells him:
“If you are walking him and a dog registration officer walks past and stops you and asks what breed he is, you can’t prove that he is not a bulldog breed. But you can say ‘He’s been chipped, he’s been castrated, I am training him’, and there’s less reason to take him away.” Bobby takes a leaflet about neutering and says that he’ll consider it.
Shivering in the freezing rain, Luke says that Qasar is a good dog, but she frequently jumps up at people. “It’s not a problem,” he adds hastily. “She mostly does it in the newsagents and they don’t mind.” Glazebrook tells Luke firmly that no matter how many people tell him it’s OK, it’s not. “What if she jumps at a kid and by mistake catches him with her teeth or knocks him over ? Qasar has got the bull breed in her so she could quite easily be on a one-way ticket to the vet to be put down.”
Luke looks shocked but the facts bear Glazebrook out. In 2008 the Metropolitan Police seized 708 dogs — four times as many as the year before. In 2010 the figure stood at 1,152. The force responded to this rise by setting up the Status Dogs Unit.
Meucci-Lyons is careful to stress that the Dogs Trust supports the police, but adds: “Unfortunately it is not as easy as that: you take a dog away and they’ll just get another one.”
Luke takes a City Dogs card and says that he will be in touch to arrange some behavioural training for Qasar. Watching them lope off Louise is delighted. “There’s been an epidemic of abandonment because they take on these dogs without understanding how to look after them, but if we can educate them to redress the problems then that is another dog that doesn’t need to go into the rescue chain.”
Meucci-Lyons says that ultimately she hopes that City Dogs will become available to young people in every borough in the country. “So, just as, if a youth has a problem with housing they call Shelter, and if they have a problem with drugs they call Frank, then I would love City Dogs to be on everyone’s mind if they encounter youths who have a problem with their dogs,” she says.
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