I suppose that what with all this and that in our dear old Department of Justice, there's little prospect of getting our quarantine laws on rabies brought into line with the rest of the European Union. The present rabies law was introduced in 1901, when wogs and mad dogs began at Calais; and in such matters the kingdom of then remains united today, rabidically removed from mainland Europe, where rabies stalks freely, causing mad dogs to lollop through the streets biting passing strangers and causing mayhem.
As our governesses always told us, Europe is a fierce dangerous place altogether, full of packs of mad dogs and small gangs of foam-flecked hydrophobic infants fresh from devouring newly-arrived and incautious visitors from the Lands of Hydrophilia - those blessed islands off the west coast of France, where rabies is unknown, where people may safely roam the streets at night,, where dogs are unmuzzled and where cows are ... no, no, I think I'll skip that bit.
Playing Safe
The only way, as we all know, to be safe in mainland Europe is to be draped in anti-rabies body-armour. I have lain on the beaches of rabies-infested southern France fully swathed in biteproof chain mail from scalp to toenails waiting for the thousands of naked people all around me to be driven berserk by rampaging flocks of rabid pooches. They went brown instead. I got heat-stroke and bit three dogs, a gendarme and a cow. The cow was put in quarantine.
Why do we have these quarantine laws? Because they are really necessary? Because Europe is a hotbed of the rabies virus? Because it gives us a sense of moral superiority, which we particularly need in the era of BSE cattle? Or because the British do it, and we haven't got the nous to say: This law is stupid and antiquated and cruel and purposeless?
It is, however, extremely profitable for the owners of quarantine kennels where incoming dogs are compelled to be confined for six months. It costs at least £1,500 to kennel a dog and since most dogs are intensely socialised, require a lot of exercise and are deeply attached to the family they are separated from, they become permanently damaged by the quarantine experience. many die soon after release, presumably from stress-related afflictions.
This a cruelty far more purposeless than any of the so-called cruelty of a foxhunt, which if it ends in a kill - never in my personal experience - does so in seconds. We should all be so lucky that our ends are so swift. Yet there is in Ireland no outcry from those increasingly vociferous animal-rights activists, probably because the animals concerned are not the idealised creatures of the wild, but socialised pets belonging to the relatively well-to-do.
But do our quarantine laws not protect us from an invasion of rabies? No. They protect us from nothing - in fact, sooner or later make it more likely that a rabid animal is illegally smuggled into Britain or Ireland because of the high cost and the cruelty of quarantine. These quarantine laws are predicated on Victorian notions of animal medicine, and imperial notions of keeping the wogs, and the dogs of wogs, at bay; they are not merely cruel and unproductive for all but the owners of quarantine-kennels; they are perfectly purposeless.
What are the facts about rabies in mainland Europe? Simply these. Dog rabies is no longer found in Europe, though fox rabies is. Dogs can contract fox-rabies, but cannot communicate it to humans. In the past 20 years, not a single human being in European Community has contracted rabies.
Demented Tarzans
Admittedly other beasts have caught rabies - all of them in the wild, and none of them a threat to humans. No doubt it would be undesirable to have a few rabid badgers munching at your ankle as you trudge across the Burren; I concede, hydrophobic squirrels swinging down from the trees like tiny demented Tarzans and attacking you under the hallucinatory effects of rabies is definitely undesirable.
But nobody is proposing that we import unchecked wild animals. What the anti-quarantine group in Britain, FIDO, is proposing is that dog-vaccinations, "accompanied by an implanted microchip-identifier, be required for the importation of dogs. It is far cheaper than quarantine - about £150, and altogether more humane.
It is also more effective - New Zealand tests show that a six-month quarantine identifies only 89 per cent of infected dogs. Eleven per cent is a lot of infected hounds about the place, looking oddly at you and wobbling. New Zealand has decided to abandon quarantine, as has Sweden - though perhaps Sweden's change of mind was hastened by its rather embarrassing massacre of a gift of prize bloodstock horses from Pakistan because they had not fulfilled quarantine requirements.
We have no real quarantine for horses because the blood-stock lobby would cry blue murder if stallions from America were obliged to trot into a quarantined stable for six months, where they would probably end up copulating with the haynet and chewing the head off the tiny groom; or vice versa. So much to the relief of tiny grooms and the disappointment of haynets everywhere, proper quarantining of racehorses doesn't happen.
Poorly Organised
The dog-owning lobby is vastly more numerous; but generally speaking, we pose little threat to the grooms of this world and we are poorly organised. Slightly better organised are the foreign ambassadors who on coming here find that they have to leave their much cherished animals at home, or submit them to a barbarous quarantine which breaks everybody's hearts. Is there nothing they can do? Declare war, say?
As with the matter of clocks,, we know, just know, that when the British change their quarantine laws, so too will we. Why do we not change our laws and compel them, because of the position of Northern Ireland, to change theirs?