Who needs pedigree - the case for mongrels as top dog
Campaigners say mixed breeds have unfair reputation
Activists are gearing up for a new battle against discrimination - this time among dogs.
They say pet lovers don't understand mongrels and discriminate unfairly against them, making it difficult to find them homes.
A five-day promotion campaign, 'Adogtion', was launched yesterday in an effort to improve the lot of the underdogs of the pet world.
Television actor Gregory Rivers - who keeps 10 mongrels at his Sai Kung home - said mixed-breed dogs were often discriminated against because of their lack of a pedigree.
'This problem does not lie on the dogs, but us,' he said at the opening of the campaign at City University. 'They are mixed breeds. But we also have friends of mixed nationalities. We would not treat them differently. Why should we not like mongrels?'
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), which co-organised the project with a team of students from the university's Community College, said many pet lovers did not like mongrels because they wrongly believed they were aggressive.
Citing official figures for last year, the SPCA said there were 286,300 families keeping 524,900 pets, of which almost 198,000 were dogs.
Rebecca Ngan Yee-ling, the society's public relations and communications manager, said the figures showed that there was something wrong.
'We at the SPCA managed to find homes for about 2,500 companion animals each year. But sadly, less than one-third of them were dogs,' she said.
'Most of the dogs that arrive in our kennels are mongrels, and that may explain why our canine adoption rate always is on the low side.'
Rivers urged those who were planning to keep pets to adopt mongrels instead of buying pedigree dogs from pet shops.
'Perhaps the government should consider controlling the import of pet dogs. When we buy or adopt a dog, we are making a life-long commitment and we should not easily abandon it,' he said.
Pat Tang, a member of the Mongrel Club, said such dogs could be very smart if properly trained. Her dog, Auntie Cheung, had won first prize in the first Hong Kong International Dog Agility Competition last December. Auntie Cheung was given to Ms Tang by a friend when she was two.
The Mongrel Club was founded last October and now has more than 100 members who keep a total of more than 200 mongrel dogs.
The Adogtion project is sponsored by the South China Morning Post, Yahoo! Hong Kong, Mongrel Club, MyPet magazine, Hill's Pet Nutrition, and Chun Ho Advertising and Marketing.
