Know your rights: Pet owners

This week, The Express Tribune looks at laws, rules, regulations that allow keeping animals as pets, ensure rights

KARACHI:

A lot of your belongings require legal permits or licences for you to either possess or use them. It could be a car, a gun or hunting or fishing permits to name just a few.

However, one of the most common members of that list are often ignored; your pets, who also require a valid ‘licence’.

This week, The Express Tribune looks at the laws, rules and regulations that allow keeping animals as pets and ensure their rights.

Watch any Hollywood movie where an animal is part of the family and you may notice two things: one, the animals are kept on a leash when taken outdoors and two, there is a tagged collar around their necks which carries a registration number. In developed countries there are laws that require citizens to have their domesticated animals registered with the local authorities. The owners are also required to get the pets vaccinated from time to time to save the pets as well as themselves from diseases that may or may not be transmittable.

Another reason for getting a pet registered is that the animal will not be picked up by the local municipal authorities, who may kill or impound them.

Animal rights in Pakistan

Faheem Khan, the director of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s (KMC) Zoo department, believes that there is no law in place that requires pets to be registered with the KMC.

“I’ve served in almost every department of the KMC during my years of service, but I’ve never heard of any such laws,” claimed the officer. Faheem also posed the same question to two of his senior colleagues sitting in his office. They, too, answered in the negative.

However, there are several examples for Pakistan to follow.

An official page of the Territory and Municipal Services of Australia, where the same legal requirement was clearly mentioned along with an online registration form under the Domestic Animals Act 2000, shows that animal registration is mandatory.

So why has Pakistan failed to have any such law in place? Perhaps it is because not many people like keeping pets in the country and a majority of pet-lovers dwell in the upscale Defence neighbourhood of Karachi.

So maybe it is only the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) that requires its members to get their domestic animals registered, otherwise they may be impounded and put down? “In all the years I’ve only seen one such public notice in the newspapers from the DHA management, otherwise, there is no intimation or information about whether the KMC has such laws,” said Mahera Omer of the Pakistan Animals Welfare Society.

Omer urged that the owners must get their pets, particularly dogs, registered in order to save them from being poisoned to death by local authorities during their drives to kill stray dogs. “It’s only the dogs, whose role has become important towards saving our lives,” said Omer. “Sniffer dogs are used by law enforcers to clear the places where either VIPs or the public gather.”

However, KMC’s official stance is that it may impose fines on dogs that are not registered, despite its officials claiming that there is no need to do so. The law says there is a Rs5,000 fine for ‘keeping ferocious dogs or other animals in residential areas or taking such animals to public places or the areas specified by the council, without leash or chain and without being muzzled, or to set at large any animal or dog infected with rabies or any other infectious disease’.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 12^th, 2014.