IT'S A DOG'S LAW

. . . but we shouldn't change it, says Rory Knight Bruce,

however loudly David Hockney and other celebrities bark

WHEN ALEXANDER Pope gave a shag- gy Iceland terrier to George II in 1737, he inscribed its collar with the epigram: 'I am his Highness' dog at Kew; pray, tell me, sir, whose dog are you?' Today, the dogs of royalty, magnates or film stars might as well have the label Karachi, Cuba or Kuch- ing strung about their necks. Under present laws, if the owners live abroad, their pets cannot enter this country without a six months' quarantine to guard against rabies.

On 12 May, a 22-year-old Latvian busi- nesswoman arrived at Gatwick airport with a Persian cat under her arm, and was surprised when immigration officials pointed out that the cat could not join her in her waiting Bentley on their journey to Claridge's. Despite her claims that she was on a short holiday, offi- cials rumbled her and Dana Cone of the world's best- travelled cats,' she mew-ed) as potential illegal immi- grants and bundled them both back to the Latvian capital of Riga.

This news will no doubt dismay the growing band of pet-owners, whether they are expatriates wishing to return to Britain or globetrotters who cannot bear to be parted from their animals. They see our draconian quaran- tine requirements as being out of step with the advances of veterinary medicine and wholly out of proportion to the proven cases of rabies; there has not been a case of human rabies here since 1922, and not a canine one since 1970.

There are now various organisations lob- bying the Government to have the quaran- tine laws repealed. Most fashionable is Passport for Pets, run by Lady Fretwell, wife of our former ambassador to Paris, Sir John Fretwell. Started 18 months ago, it has 2,000 members, including Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh Grant and Caroline Quentin, wife of the television comedian Paul Mer- ton. 'Lots of our members like to go camp- ing in Normandy; they see other Continental dogs there and can't under- stand why they can't take theirs,' says Lady Fretwell, who owns a basset hound called Claude.

The aim of Passport for Pets is to allow dogs and cats free access to travel abroad and return, provided they have the proper documentation. This, they say, must include identity and veterinary records of inoculation. They also point out that such information could be achieved by inserting a microchip in their pet. As additional security, they agree that their pet could be left at a returning British port for a couple of days to ensure the microchip was in order. All as easy as a booze cruise to Calais.

Then there is the Federation of Army Wives in Cyprus. In March of this year, they presented Roger Gale, Tory MP for Thanet North (majority 18,210) and chair- man of the Commons all-party animal wel- fare group, with a 3,500-name petition from armed forces personnel living in Cyprus, many of whom will soon be returning to this country. They want him to press in Parliament for their pets to be brought into this country without quaran- tine, provided they have been inoculated and passed a blood test.

'It is feasible with modern veterinary methods,' says Mr Gale, the owner of two Labradors, nine cats and a Jack Russell. 'There are 6,000 military families in Cyp- rus, which is a rabies-free island, and many of them have pets. At the end of their tour, they can either pay for quarantine, which even according to my bad maths is £1,500 per pet, or give their pet to Barc.' (Bare is the British Army Rescue Centre, which either tries to find homes for the animals or puts them down after six weeks.) The high-profile campaign to end quar- antine is, however, beginning to stimulate a fightback, not least from the quarantine kennel owners themselves. 'If Chris Patten is trying to get preferential treatment for his dogs, it is a gross misuse of his public position,' says Guy Tamplin, chairman of the Quarantine Kennel Owners' Associa- tion which has 35 member kennels. 'There is virulent hookworm in Hong Kong, and the police there have plenty of records of Patten's terriers biting people.' Mr Tam- plin, who keeps his own kennel in Glouces- tershire, also disputes Mr Gale's claim that Cyprus is 'rabies-free'. 'Dogs can travel freely by ferry from northern Cyprus to and from southern Turkey, which is riddled with rabies,' he says.

Glamorous dog-owners, of course, are sure that their pets would never do any- thing as common as catch rabies. Recently, the British actor Rupert Everett, who lives in France, turned down what he called 'a plum' West End role because he could not bear to be parted from Moise, his seven- year-old labrador. 'I am an English person and I think I have the right to have my dog in England,' he said in March. (Everett's view of pets has certainly improved. I recall staying with him in Essex as a teenager and watching him lob sods of earth at tame ducks on his parents' pond.) If Everett has changed the theatrical dic- tum to never working without animals, he is in good company. Recently, a woman call- ing herself Mrs Blatchley, just arrived from Spain, put her dog Suki, a ten-year-old poodle, into the Little Acre kennels at Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire. The kennel- owners, Dave and Sue Williams, fed Suki under veterinary advice, but Mrs Blatchley complained that her dog looked thin and was suffering from diarrhoea. She then informed them, and the Mail on Sunday, that she was in fact the actress Anne Aubrey.

'I didn't know she was some up-and- coming actress,' says Mrs Williams, who has run the rural four-acre kennels for 15 years and has provision for 98 dogs, 58 cats and as many gerbils or rodents as you legal- ly care to import. Nor did she know that Miss Aubrey, who in the Fifties was in a film called The Killers of Kilimanjaro with Robert Taylor, was also about to publish a book. Miss Aubrey says she has now become an active anti-quarantine cam- paigner.

Mrs Williams also takes issue with Mr Gale's figures on quarantine costs. The standard tariff, she says, which includes col- lecting the pet from arrival port or airport, all inoculations and the six-month stay, is £1,150 for a big dog (25 lbs or over), £990 for a cat, and £250 for a gerbil and as many free spins of its spacious cage wheel as it can manage. All armed services personnel get a 15 per cent discount.

Two other figures, perhaps better known than 'the star of the Fifties and Sixties' (as the Mail on Sunday described Mrs Blatch- ley), who are hopelessly devoted to their dogs are David Hocicney and Frank Lowe, chairman of the Lowe Group. Mr Hock- ney, who lives in California, is inseparable from his sausage-roll dachshunds, Sophie, Stanley and Boodgie. 'I would never put a pet into quarantine,' he told me when visit- ing his native Bridlington in Yorkshire recently. 'My dogs sleep with me.' Mr Hockney said he would travel with his dachshunds if the laws changed and they were younger. 'The essential problem', he claimed, 'is that, contrary to common wisdom, the British hate dogs. Here in Bridlington, there are signs which say when YOU may and may not take dogs on the beach. I know what those signs are really saying: "Dogs must shit here and not here".' He added, 'It's all about piss and shit. The British are terrible with animals. I have never had any trouble in Paris. I have sat in a restaurant there with a dog at the next table and we could both smoke cigars. That is proof of a tolerant and civilised society.'

Frank Lowe is now a resident of Switzer- land, where he keeps three Pekineses, Chelsea, Lucy (who looks a bit like Tina Turner, says his PA) and Madison. 'I love my dogs, as do my wife and family,' says Mr Lowe. 'We think it's hateful that they can- not come here. Everyone knows we can have dogs tagged now, and there is no sci- entific evidence for rabies.' Mr Lowe also points out that plenty of Americans and Europeans refuse to work in Britain because they cannot freely bring their pets with them. He will not vote for any party that will not repeal the quarantine laws (none of the three main parties at present). Instead he has recently helped fund and redesign the brochures for Passport for Pets.

Clearly, quarantine laws are an emotive issue. Yet, those who are affected by them amount to no more than 10,000, as opposed to the 15 million dog- and cat- owners in Britain for whom the spectre of rabies, or indeed the difficulties and cost of frequent inoculation would prove a night- mare. The recently widowed pensioner in Spain might reasonably ask why her poodle has to be quarantined when Whisky and Soda, owned by 'responsible people', could swan through the Customs green channel smoking one of David Hockney's cigars. Surely there should not be one law for the military or diplomatic corps and another for Mrs Average? Then there is the veterinary dilemma, as the RSPCA's former chief veterinary offi- cer, Terence Bate, pointed out in March 1994 to the Agriculture Committee of the House of Commons: 'It can be said with truth that our present system of quarantine Salad dressing. . . . has worked well. It should not be aban- doned lightly.' He concludes that 'no vac- cine can be relied upon to be 100 per cent effective'.

His successor, Jim Phillips, goes further. 'The thought of rabies entering the wildlife population is horrifying. It would cause mayhem. It weighs heavy in our whole view of quarantine. Britain's freedom from rabies must take priority. No sane person would disagree.'

Such caution and concern for British wildlife is based on experience. When mink were imported into this country in the 1950s, and then improperly released, the effect was to rob many riverbanks of all other wildlife (one resident mink will kill all other bankside occupants for a mile). Secondly, as the RSPCA Commons report highlights, if rabies entered the urban fox population, the infection would rapidly pass to domestic dogs and cats.

Nor is it entirely true that there has been no case of dog rabies since 1970. Five years ago, two small dogs arrived from Zambia at the Hazel House kennels near Midhurst, West Sussex, owned by Christine Mayhew. 'Despite having the requisite documenta- tion, within two weeks one dog had fits, became paralysed in the back legs and had to be put to sleep.' Two subsequent tests showed rabies in the brain. A third did not. The government veterinary officers there- fore did not register it as a rabies case. When Mrs Mayhew approached the public health authority in London for a post-expo- sure anti-rabies injection for herself and her six-year-old daughter, she was refused, since to give one would be registered as acknowledging a case of rabies.

The present quarantine laws and stan- dard of kennels may not be ideal, but if we are to put our trust instead in European vets, as the abolitionists would have us do, they should be aware of the European Commission's Bendixon-Dexter report on European veterinary practice, compiled three years ago but so far not published. Are we to dissolve our own quarantine laws before we know of the true vagaries of European methods? (And there are plenty of examples of falsified documents, say the Quarantine Kennel Owners' Association.) In 1995, the World Health Organisation reported a rabies outbreak in Dusseldorf in which 192 adults and 72 children were affected, though not fatally; in Belgium, the number of rabies cases has leapt from two to 200 in the last year.

Perhaps the quarantine period could be shortened, if we were certain (and not with the kind of 'certainty' the Tory gov- ernment has been claiming over BSE) that medical science had eradicated a threat of rabies and that owners inoculat- ed their pets correctly from birth. But it would still only take one untested cat from Latvia on its way to Claridges in a Bentley to turn the city of Macavity's noc- turnal adventures into a far more danger- ous place for the rest of us.