Can you love dogs yet keep 40 of them in a cage?

OPINION: The orphaned puppy featured in newspapers and on TV over the past few days seems, on the face of it, a perfect symbol of the heartlessness of the mass dog shooting in Wellsford.

White, fluffy and small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, the puppy encapsulated the vulnerability of the large pack of dogs shot dead by angry neighbours.

The media, which craves to turn every news story into a simple morality tale with good guys on one side and bad guys on the other, found another survivor worthy of our pity: the dog's owner, Rowan Hargreaves. So upset that he required counselling from friends, Mr Hargreaves said the experience had been like having his family shot.

All very touching, but imagine how the story might have been reported if journalists had descended on Mr Hargreaves' property on January 24, the day before the shooting.

Mr Hargreaves, a mechanic with a ZZ Top beard, lives in an old truck. His 40 dogs - mongrels descended from a single breeding pair - lived in wrecked cars and in a large steel cage. They were unregistered, and in the days before the shooting had savaged to death a sheep and, allegedly, a neighbour's fox terrier.

If this is a family, it's a deeply dysfunctional one. But I have yet to hear anyone involved in animal welfare suggest that Mr Hargreaves is a few pigs' testicles short of a tin of Champ. SPCA executive Bob Kerridge even said the dogs had been healthy, well looked after and "much loved".

Um, hang on . . . weren't there 40 of them? Aside from the good loving, is it possible for one person to walk, feed, and pay the vet's bills for 40 dogs? And doesn't the SPCA prefer owners to register their dogs, and provide them with a more appropriate place to live than a car wreck, and prevent them from wandering around the neighbourhood mauling livestock?

People like Mr Hargreaves, who collect dogs like kids collect Pokemon cards, have no hope of keeping their pets under control. Something bad is clearly going to happen: it's just a question of what, and to whom.

While Mr Hargreaves is painted as an innocent victim, the neighbours who shot these plainly out-of- control dogs have been demonised. SPCA inspector Sacha Keltie compared the scene to a massacre, and said it was the most horrible thing she'd seen. Another SPCA inspector referred to the incident as an "execution" - a curious choice of words, given that shooting is still considered an acceptable way of slaughtering farm animals.

Don't get me wrong - the way the neighbours waded into Mr Hargreaves' yard and started blazing away with their rifles is cruel, creepy, and just a tiny bit mad. It did, however, take just 20 minutes for the dogs to die - a fraction of the lifetime of suffering many animals are subjected to in this country.

Tauranga MP Simon Bridges has just drafted a member's bill to raise the minimum penalty for wilful mistreatment of animals from three to five years in prison. Why bother, given that judges never sentence even the vilest animal abusers to the existing maximum sentence?

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As far as I'm aware, the toughest punishment was the 12-month jail term imposed on a Dunedin dog torturer last year. Usually, animal abusers get away with minor fines or piffling terms of community service.

We don't give animal protection agencies even a fraction of the funding they need to properly investigate cases of abuse. And why, when announcing his bill, did Mr Bridges say tougher penalties for animal abuse were justified because cruelty to animals is an early warning sign of psychopathic behaviour? Do we care so little about the suffering of animals that we'll take action only if it has some bearing on future human suffering?

Then there was the eagerness of commentators such as the suitably barking Deborah Coddington to draw a line between cruelty to pets and cruelty to farm animals.

Why do we divide animals into two types: the ones we eat, and the ones we love? As the Australian philosopher Peter Singer has pointed out, there is no sense in giving less weight to the suffering of a cow just because it isn't as smart as us.

Rail against the Wellsford vigilantes, by all means, but let's not pretend there's much more logic or morality in the way of the rest of us treat animals.

- © Fairfax NZ News