I agree all they do is clamp down sporadically and then cause an awful lot of heartache to people with well behaved dogs classed as type. It's a pointless exercise.
I thought previously statistics weren't kept for dog bites as such, and even those statistics are somewhat flawed. You can easily be bitten and need hospital treatment breaking up a dog fight, hardly a dangerous dog situation.

I think there's two aspects to this:

Firstly there's the inconvenience of applying for and sitting the test itself. I personally beleive that this will immediately deter a large number of the least commited owners. I have seen too often dogs change hands for the cost of a pint or less. Casual or impulsive acquisition by people who have little idea of the commitment they are taking on. I have seen dogs used to settle drug debts and then sold on for whatever the new owner can realise for the dog before the day is out. I have heard of dogs being sold to children and then becoming homeless as soon as the parents find out. My mother once bought a puppy because someone had just wolf-whistled at her and she'd wished she had a big dog to set upon them - what sort of a reason was that!?!?

So I think the test itself, regardless of difficulty, will serve as a filter for the least committed and a cool-off period for the most impulsive and at a stroke relieve us of many of the very worst owners.

Secondly the test itself can indeed educate. We do not have to tax our minds too much to recall the owner who bought a hyperactive terrier in the mistaken belief that small dogs don't need exercise. Or the owner of an aggressive dog that seems astoundingly unaware of their legal responsibilities. Or the owner that never knew they should socialise their dog or the one who thought that a carboot sale was an appropriate place to purchase their dog.

My god, Trouble, if we could find a market for ignorance we'd have no difficulty getting rich!

Ask a trainer how many customer's dogs come from puppyfarms - bet there's a few in every class. And if we question the owners on how and why they made their purchase decision we would discover that some knew what they were doing but didn't care that they were supporting a puppyfarm, they just wanted a dog now - The DOT, by placing a need to sit the test first puts a serious impediment in the place of someone who wants a dog now, now now - or that they didn't know about puppyfarms or perhaps didn't really understand the depths of suffering or how their purchase has ensured future suffering - the DOT can make certain that they do know and do understand and can demonstrate this knowledge.

Sure, I would expect that forum-users like you and I, who are computer literate, motivated to learn and keen to do best by our dogs, might find the test simplistic or insufficiently demanding but for the lady I met in my local park who was walking her 9 month GSD for the first time in its life it would be a different story!


The test fee is not set but the author of the proposal believes that the DOT can be self-financing at £40. That's a once-in-a-lifetime cost. It's per owner, not per dog. Existing owners would have a lengthy period of grace before having to take the test (maybe two years which would amount to 50 pence per week).

I have to ask, if you can't afford that can you afford a dog?


For me one of the joys of DOT is that it is, in the main, self-enforcing. A legal burden is placed on all media to ensure that advertisers of dogs have the supplier level DOT, the SDOT, and suppliers ensure that all buyers have the DOT. Media will comply so as to avoid the fines. Suppliers will comply because any un-DOT'ed buyer that they sell a dog to will be a risk to their livelihood for the rest of that dog's life. At any point that owner could be challenged, discovered to be DOTless and set in motion a chain that leads straight back to the supplier. It'd just not worth the risk. With media watching breeders and breeders watching buyers and buyers watching media the whole thing polices itself and leaves the police and dog wardens free to persue the small number of hardcore non-compliants.

That's fair comment but it still doesn't cover dog-on-dog attacks, the rescue crisis or dog attacks like Archie-Lee and the others I've mentioned or any of the other problems that arise from irresponsible ownership. The DOT won't cure these things, of course, but it could offer massive improvements.

Sorry, I don't think I was clear in my post.

The 'Deed not Breed' campaign is flawed because its message has little or nothing to attract the non-dog owner who just wants to be safe and untroubled by our dogs. It's proposed laws are reactive (after the attack) and so offers nothing to the wider non-dog owning public besides saving them a bunch of money prosecuting people's pets. The campaign, correctly, argues the injustice of our laws but the only victims are pitbull 'types' and their owners for which the wider public has little sympathy.

The DOT has a different emphasis in that it offers to make the general public safer by educating all dog owners and it will do so out of it own funds and save the public all the money that is currently wasted persuing section one DDA.

To give a little perspective dogs seized under section one typically spends 5 -6 months in kennels, are subject to expensive assesments (experts witnesses for the prosecution,btw, are paid a lot more than the defence ones) and yet ninety-five percent are found to be harmless and are returned to their families. Ninety-five percent! That's not an effective use of public money.

So when I say the public will be safer I mean because there will be less irresponsible owners and when I say they will save money it is because the DOT is self-financing unlike the DDA.

Dogs that have bitten are treated under sections two and/or three of the DDA. This would continue as the DOT seeks only the repeal of section one.

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Sorry but I still can't see how it's workable. We have car tax with all safety nets in place to catch dodgers and yet we still have dodgers. Car tax has to be displayed at all times unlike this certificate and yet somehow it seems to still be dodged. Tv licences are dodged, council tax is dodged. So basically the law abiding would abide by the law and everyone else would carry on as normal.
Tail docking is illegal and yet I met a 5month old docked Dobermann over the fields a couple of days ago, when I commented they claimed complete ignorance of the law. Apparently their vet had never mentioned it and the breeder clearly didn't.
As for dog warden what blimmin dog warden we haven't got one.

It's a theory test like the written part of a driving license test so no, you don't need to bring a dog.

The actual test has not been written yet so I'm guessing that it will be multi-choice type.

An important obstacle that any test must overcome is inclusiveness. The test must not discriminate against people who may be disabled or for whom english is a second language or the dyslexic, etc. To do so would be illegal so any test must operate within these constraints.

Another problem the test must overcome is that it must restrict itself to questions that are entirely objective. It cannot ask "How do you train a dog to sit?" because there's about a million different answers but it can ask "What emotion, apart from tiredness, might a yawning dog be expressing?", "When can a dog walk in public without a collar and name-tag?", "What is the correct body temperature for a dog at rest", "What breeds does the DDA apply to?" etc, etc.

As the author once said 'Imagine two hundred questions like this. It couldn't help but make people better dog owners.' I agree with him.

I also agree with critics who argue that the test might be so simple as to be utterly meaningless. For sure, we won't know until it's written but I think it retains the potential to educate.

I think road tax is a pretty good example.

I recall back in the eighties regularly chancing my arm and driving without tax but not these days. Non-compliance is very low. There are still some who are determined to break the law. There always are and the DOT won't change that but how many people would buy road tax if it was voluntary?

Because that's pretty much the situation we have now with regards educating ourselves about dogs.

With regards your absentee dog warden the author of this proposal estimates that, at a test fee of £40, there should be spare funds for additional wardens.

(I can hear those of a cynical mind guffawing up their sleeves but, like the test, we must wait to see how that pans out. Let us say the plan retains the potential for extra wardens without mugging the general taxpayer for more money.)

Surely education is something you acquire prior to being tested, I'm not anti education, far from it but you can't force people to learn otherwise as a nation we would be far better educated than we are.
I am against the constant interferance in our daily lives by yet more legislation.
I can't tell you what my dogs normal tempreture should be off the top of my head, but I can recognise the signs of ill health and I can look up anything I don't know.
Many things in life are illegal and the laws appear to be enforced and yet people still take the risk and break the law because the chances of being caught are not that great.

If they're being truthful then the DOT could fix that.

If they're being untruthful then the DOT would destroy the credibility of their lie.

Yeah I am a cynic you're right but I'm not guffawing. I already pay for a dog warden in my council tax, but we don't have a huge problem apparently and the money is used for other things.
Unlike you, I've never dodged car tax and I don't believe dodging it is that rare now either. Tax discs are forever being nicked when a vehicle is broken into, because as long as the vehicle looks ok in all other respects a tax disc is rarely checked. The Dvla relies heavily on computers for their info rather than eyes.