Dogged campaigners
A cause close to my heart this week, with a campaign from the CWU to tighten the Dangerous Dogs Act, to spare the nation’s posties from the jaws of the nation’s best friends. Up to 6,000 UK posties are attacked by dogs every year on their rounds, and many injured seriously, just so dog owners can get their junk mail and ebay purchases.
Nutty as it sounds, the Act that was supposed to stop the problems associated with bad dogs and bad owners only applies on public land, even though the dogs don’t actually become any less dangerous when you take them off the pavement. This is (in some cases quite literally) a pain for posties and other delivery staff, who have to venture onto private land to deliver for the dogs’ owners. As the CWU’s Dave Joyce said “The law requires us to deliver to every single address but it doesn’t protect our members from out of control, dangerous and aggressive dogs.”
As a confirmed dog hater myself, I can totally sympathise. As a kid in the 80’s, I helped out on the Christmas post one year. It wasn’t a bad part time job if you didn’t mind the hours (tho nowhere near as early as the regulars had to get up), and it paid a hefty £4.50 an hour (twice what I was getting on the counter in the supermarket).
The postie I was shadowing was a nice bloke, who hated dogs nearly as much as me. He told that he knew enough colleagues who’d been bitten on the town’s rounds and he’d devised his own unofficial policy that he kindly told me to stick to. If I saw a dog anywhere on the premises, that address didn’t get their post. I’d come back with it again the next day, feeling all self-righteous, and if the dog was gone they could have it then.
I’ve got over most of my dogophobia these days - a canny girlfriend trained me to focus my thoughts onto loathing them rather than being scared of them, which isn’t ideal, but a lot better than being ‘fraidy. But venturing into some potentially dangerous mutt’s territory without the law on my side is not a job I’d want to do. With pit-bull ownership on the rise again in many places, the danger must be a very real concern to a lot of the CWU’s members.
BTW, I’m indebted to CWU for some Friday entertainment from their press release about this too, as it also mentions problems they have been having with deliveries to a Yorkshire village, which goes by the remarkable name of Booze. Googling for typos, I found the village of Booze really does exist, and not only that, but it’s a dry village with no pub. No wonder the post is off there if you’ve no chance of finding a hair of the dog that bit you 
August 18th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
As a regular purveyor of fine socialist propaganda that goes through peoples’ letter boxes, this campaign has my full backing. I’m fed up of having to extricate my fingers from the maw of some yappy-type dog who likes to sit just beneath the letter box. Enough is enough!