Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Stupid dog owners, stupid drivers

by · 3rd October, 2006

Over the last couple of weeks, two separate news stories have emerged, both related to people owning toys which, frankly, are too big and grown up for them: dogs and cars. Last weekend a five-month-old girl, Cadey-Lee Deacon, was savaged to death by two Rottweilers, known to be vicious and of whom most locals were terrified, which were used to guard a pub in Leicester. Also in the news were various stories about people being killed by stupid young drivers, most notably a young doctor killed by a speeding, disqualified driver. This has led to the usual calls for the driving age to be raised, among other things.

Michele Hanson wrote this amusing article about dogs and stupid owners. Hanson has observed people turning a perfectly nice puppy into a “snarling monster” by keeping it on a short lead while having people stand around and taunt it for hours. While vicious dogs are commonly associated with male owners who want, in the words of a friend of hers, “a dick-on-a-string”, women can be just as stupid, by doing such a thing as refusing to take one’s dog out for fear that it might put its nose up another dog’s bottom. (Never mind another dog’s bottom; I’ve actually seen a blind woman walking her guide dog in Beddington Park when another dog walked up behind her and sniffed her behind. Still, at least it didn’t disturb the guide dog.)

Hanson suggests bringing back the old dog licence system, which I agree with although I don’t think £150 is a particularly realistic amount; at most half that would be more appropriate. What I would really like to see is a tough code of practice for dog owners, such as that they are not let off the leash in the street, only in dog-running areas of parks, that they are not allowed to crap in alleyways and anywhere else people walk, and that when people come to the house on business, they are kept somewhere they cannot harrass the visitors. Still, a dog is a big responsibility, much bigger than a cat, and people should need to undergo some degree of training before they can go out and get one, so that they know how the dog needs keeping and what is and is not acceptable behaviour. They should, for example, know that not everyone cares to have their mutt slobber all over them.

Listening to the case of the young woman doctor knocked down by a speeding juvenile delinquent motorist, speeding because he was late for a court appearance for affray, made me want to call the Jeremy Vine show on which the mother’s emotional victim impact statement was read, because the sort of behaviour described was something I have experienced a number of times in my agency driving career. In particular, in a certain car hire site near Croydon they employ drivers who drive recklessly in order to cut a few minutes off their journeys, driving too fast for the conditions (if not the speed limit) and cutting corners. On one occasion, the idiot driver took two of his mates, and me, along a hair-raising spin along various back roads in Croydon, apparently chosen for the purpose of having lots of bends to throw the car around rather than for being the quickest route. He eventually managed to strike a traffic island in Spring Lane, SE25, at which point I left the party and went back to base. The driver still wasn’t fired when I told the boss about the incident; he had to cause another accident for that to happen.

I might not have gone down too well with the lady or made myself very popular on that show, however, because I tend to be on the anti side of the camera debate precisely because it picks up what may be the less harmful types of rule-breaking and saves the authorities the leg-work in tracking down the reckless drivers, not only the boy racers but those in the commercial sector - such as the fruit and vegetable dealers in New Covent Garden who send their foreign drivers out at the crack of dawn and tell them, as I was told, to do “at least 70”. You can’t catch a corner-cutter or an otherwise stupid driver with a speed camera. You actually need to do some policing for that.

I also can’t agree with the call to raise the driving age, because a fair number of these incidents involve people who drive while they are disqualified anyway. Most of Europe has a higher driving age (18) than ours (17), and anyone who has been to parts of continental Europe can tell you how bad driving standards are there, particularly further south. And let’s not get onto the topic of gender differences: while the worst incidents which don’t involve drink involve young men, not necessarily 17-year-olds, I’ve met some bad young female drivers in my time who drive too fast or cut corners. I started driving myself at 17, as I’m sure many do simply because they can, and while I’ve had a few accidents that have been my fault, I’ve always been a very careful driver to the extent that I’ve not had so much as a speeding ticket in all this time. We should not resort to raising the driving age and punish all young drivers for the crimes of an idiotic few who tend to be otherwise delinquent anyway.

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