Dogs and Estatut

As many of yours know, our cats and dogs need a document called pet animals’ passport necessary to travel to European Union countries. This document is the same for all the countries except for the language printed and the front cover where the origin country is. The other day it caught my attention, since I admit that I did not know about this existence, the fact of a passport from Catalunya, printed in the Catalán language and English, and brought by a new client coming from Gerona. I can tell you that we have never seen a document exclusive for any European Region, and either one edited only in one of the co-officials languages existing in some European country.

Undoubtedly, the edition of an independent passport of the Spanish Kingdom is just an anecdote without importance, however I think that all these details are ridiculous and they are just political decisions that penetrate more and more in a fact that tries to make a fictitious difference between territories and peoples. I would not like to make of this article a politic one, but although the Cataluña government has the legitimacy to edit this passport, was it really necessary? If they have had a perfect and alive bilingualism in streets, literature, theatre, etc. for years, do they really need to make laws to turn this process in favour of the Catalán language? Is it really necessary some rules to institutionalise cultural and linguistic differences?

Look out. This spiral of being different from the others, although it is paranoia levels in some Autonomic Communities, it is also spread to all of them, so in Murcia we already have a football selection and we have had played a game against the Ecuador national selection, but polemic arise because we did not have a regional song, should we order one? In reality, the question is does Murcia need a football selection with a song to make a difference between people from Albacete or Almería.

It is dangerous when politicians make politics and produce fictitious tensions and problems. So coming back to the articles’ title, we are going to see some common examples doing with my job where the political matters have been more important than technical decisions or the common sense.

Every Autonomic Community has now its own database, created under political imposition, where all the dogs are identified by a chip, but it is impossible to have access into the database of any other Community. So if someone coming from Móstoles, Zafra, Baracaldo, Cracovia or Birmingham, for example, to spend holidays in Murcia, and their dogs run away, it will be very difficult to contact the owner, because when we introduce the chip in the computer, this animal will not appear in the Murcia register. Obviously, this makes no sense, since the common sense would be an only database for the whole country, and even for the whole European Union. This way, some Autonomic Communities have included in their laws dangerous dogs that are not in other, or different requirements to own this kind of animals.

Of course, all these problems get bigger when we talk about the farm market, but we will talk about this issue in the next article.