WEEKEND VIEW #1: Better Approach For Councils

I HAVE been learning about a lot of things lately. 

The most recent has been about local councils. 

For example: When you happen to find yourself in a situation where you are on a head on collision against them, what do you do?

Is it better to: A) Fight them? Or B) engage with them in order to try and get them on your side?   

Well, I never thought that as a person who had on several occasions championed canine issues in my wheelchair with the local authorities that a day would come by when I would suddenly find myself almost totally on their side.

And who would have dreamt – and God forbid – that I would even have to spar with some of my animal activist friends over the matter!

That happened recently over reports of allegations of cruelty that came out in the newspapers over a particular dog pound in Selangor.

Now please, don’t you all go and misunderstand me.

It’s not that I believe that nothing bad ever took place in the pound.

It very well could have. Just as animal activists we know such cases probably occur at one time or another in other local council pounds throughout the country.

The pictures of so-called “acts of cruelty” indicating something that was going on at the pound that was certainly not alright was one thing.

However, my real problem was in believing some of those nasty stories. Particularly so when I visited the pound in my official capacity as the Canine Advisory Team (CAT) chairman of my local council.  

So much so that whatever really happened became lost as a result in the contradictions and exaggerations, ranging from incredulity to ludicrousness.  

Reports of dogs, for example, being systematically starved to death and then suddenly being changed to “abuse” of being fed with only white rice.

Canines being drowned by local council staff, or suddenly being torched alive sounded very much like a horror story right out of some medieval time of a crazy canine-cleansing ritual camp where officials take great pleasure in torturing dogs for fun and sport.

All these happening right in front of our eyes here in modern Malaysia!

"What I don’t understand is that if such heinous proportions of cruelty were being committed by anybody, why weren’t police reports duly made?"

And some of these “human animal torturers” were people who made it a point to regularly attend our monthly CAT meetings.

What I don’t understand is that if such heinous proportions of cruelty were being committed by anybody, why weren’t police reports duly made? 

Or lawyers employed to take the perpetrators to court – especially if incriminating pictures existed? 

The truth of the matter is the Department of Veterinary Services (DVS) - the rightful body to take action against cruelty matters in Malaysia – visited the local pound last week – as they had done several times before.

The pound was given an all-clear sign after the DVS had pointed out measures of improvements to take for the future.

Last week, funnily enough, a group of disabled activists and I visited the very same local council for a totally different matter.

We were there in our wheelchairs mostly to conduct an access survey exercise on how friendly the local council building was to people with disabilities.

We decided to take a much softer and more-friendly approach with the council.

None of us shouted or tried to hurl accusations at them even though we were not completely happy with the conditions of their building.

Instead, after tea, we got them to take us on a tour around their buildings and made our critical assessments of what we saw around us.

But not before getting some of the building, engineering, planning and landscape experts into wheelchairs themselves or blindfolded just to allow them to have an experiential perspective of what life was like for us as persons with disabilities.   

We watched as an engineer struggled to get “his wheelchair” into the men’s restroom. He became so frustrated that he jumped out of the wheelchair in the end.

I asked a “blinded” key building staff to push the non-Brailled buttons in the lift to get us to the ground floor. She had no idea where the buttons were or which button to press for which floor because there were no markings on it for the blind.

And when we got to the right floor, she was totally unaware as there was no voice synthesizer to indicate which floor the lift had made its stop on.

The two hours spent on the exercise was a huge learning experience for both parties.

For the key planners of the town, it was an eye-opener as to how the needs of a very important community had been not thought about enough by the council.

Now imagine if we decided to take a totally aggressive approach?  

For us, it was a simple and valuable lesson in life when it comes to local councils: There is always a better and another more effective way to skin a cat. (Please pardon the expression.)

Note: Pictures are also courtesy of the Independent Living and Training Centre in Rawang, Selangor. 

The End

 


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