Mad dogs and Little Englanders

Roy Hattersley After four years, Buster responds to 15 words. None of them is French, Italian or German

I SUSPECT that my dog Buster is a chauvinist. He likes most what he knows best. Every morning in Derbyshire, he jumps over the same stiles that he jumped over the day before, and each night he refuses to go to bed until he has had his teeth cleaned - or at least eaten the toothpaste from the brush.

Therefore I doubt that he has much time for foreigners, their funny food and their strange talk. After four years of careful tuition - and constant bribery - he has learned to respond to 15 separate words. None of them is French, Italian or German. Buster, I guess, is a Little Englander.

Not that we have discussed the subject. Since he dominates our conversation, it is almost exclusively concerned with topics of canine interest. His diaries contained no opinions about the single European Currency or the future of the Commonwealth. They did, however, register Buster's astonishment that, when he came into my life, I said that going to Italy would be a problem. As he rightly predicted, the problem was easily solved. We do not go to Italy anymore.

I doubt if I shall revert to my old habits even when "passports for pets" are introduced. I certainly support the idea. They are necessary - indeed essential - to Britons who return home after working abroad and to dog owners among our European partners who take jobs in the Britain. But I cannot see Buster enjoying sweating it out on a 500-mile car journey or retaining his composure while locked in a box in an aeroplane luggage hold. My two weeks of Pinot Grigio and pasta would begin and end with a day of horror for him.

In normal circumstances he is a happy traveller. This weekend, as on every other, we will go together north by train. He will fall asleep under the carriage table as we move out of St Pancras and not wake until we are in Chesterfield. But that is because he will be with familiar company in familiar circumstances. To make it possible to share an annual continental holiday, a way has to be found of keeping all the family together in comfort. I stood with him on the rain-soaked deck when we crossed from Oban to the Isle of Mull. Neither of us would like to repeat the experience going round the Bay of Biscay.

That being said, the reform of our quarantine laws is long overdue. It is absurd that Chris Patten should not be allowed to bring his dogs home with him. And it is tragic that so many humbler returning expatriates (without a house in France to use as a temporary refuge) should be forced to leave their dogs in kennels until it is certain that they are clear of rabies. Many kennels are hideously inadequate, and even the best cannot provide the companionship most dogs need. But the real objection to quarantine is that it is absurdly unnecessary.

Only a department as old-fashioned and incompetent as the Ministry of Agriculture would have kept the antiquated quarantine laws in place for so long. For the last ten years there has been a obvious alternative. It has not been adopted, at least in part, because "the island race" wanted to go on being different from its EU partners. The supporters of quarantine - aside from kennel owners with livelihoods to lose - talk as if the streets of Paris and Cologne were made hideous by the cries of rabid poodles and dachshunds, foaming at the mouth as they look forward to infecting healthy English setters, Welsh corgis and Highland terriers.

The rest of Europe is as just as keen to keep its animals healthy as we are in Britain. Anyone who doubts it should remember BSE. And, even if Europe were as recklessly irresponsible as the quarantine apologists make out, there is now a foolproof method of preventing rabies travelling across the Channel. Dogs can be inoculated against the disease, and a micro-chip, buried in the loose skin at the back of their necks, allows easy identification of those who have been protected. If only inoculated dogs are allowed to travel, there is nothing to worry about.

Buster would, I think, reject both inoculation and microchip outright. His complaint against vets is that he can never visit one without having a needle stuck in him, and the notion of "chips" would leave him wholly confused. After all, he is forbidden to pick them up when he passes a McDonald's on one of his late-night London walks.

It all adds up to his staying in Britain by choice. But, being a reasonable dog, he realises that some people have to travel, and that it is wickedly pointless to break up their happy families.

`Buster's Diaries' (as told to Roy Hattersley) is published in paperback by Warner at pounds 4.95 on 19 August.