Should neutering pets be mandatory?

Dogs have long been regarded as “man´s best friend” and cats are often considered adorable, but stray or abandoned animals pose a huge problem in Portugal and there’s no solution in sight.

It’s a worldwide conundrum. The European Union estimates there are about one hundred million homeless dogs and cats across the continent.

A single unspayed female dog and her offspring can produce 67, 000 puppies in six years.

A similar exponential calculation concludes that in seven years a single cat and her offspring can produce a population of 370,000.

In Portugal, despite updated protection laws and the dedicated work of veterinarians, municipal authorities and animal welfare charities, the problem of homeless animals continues to multiply.

Sterilisation – spaying females and castrating males – seems the most humane and practical means of control, yet it’s viewed by many people as cruel, immoral, or even religiously sinful.

Traditional anti-sterilisation sentiment – especially about castration - is still common in Portugal.

So is the practice of dumping unwanted animals by the wayside or in rubbish bins. The threat of criminal prosecution, fines or even jail sentences for abuse or abandonment is frequently ignored.

Animals on the loose are vulnerable to malnutrition, injury and disease, as well as pregnancies that proliferate the suffering.

Conflicting and muddled attitudes on what to do about this are compounded when emotion takes precedence over rational thinking. Awareness education is increasingly needed.

But the real nub of the matter is money.

Pet animals are usually abandoned because owners are unable or unwilling to pay for basic food and medical essentials.

Abandoned dogs and cats that don’t perish from starvation, road accidents or mutilation in garbage trucks usually end up in municipal compounds or charity shelters, all of which struggle with limited funds. Taxpayers and donors foot the bills.

Municipal centres are overcrowded with unwanted animals. Before last year’s parliamentary decision to ban culling except in cases to relieve intolerable suffering, an estimated 100,000 street animals were being collected and “put down” in Portugal each year.

The ban was generally welcomed, but it is still controversial and has intensified the need for municipal facilities. The difficulty of rehoming municipal kennel and cattery inmates is acute. No one wants to adopt a pet unless it is lovable and certainly not if it is uncontrollably aggressive or feral.

Of course, dogs and cats support profitable businesses, notably veterinary clinics and suppliers of pet food.

Sterilisation may only be carried out by qualified and registered veterinary surgeons, and it generates a significant part of their income.

The going rates vary considerably between vets. Depending on weight, the charge for sterilising a male dog ranges from about €90 to €150, and for a female €150 to €300. For male cats, it costs about €50 to €65 and for females €80 to €125.

But vets will sterilise for charities at much lower prices. To avoid paying a vet the full rate, those who rescue one or more animals and want to arrange sterilisation can apply for a discount through a charity.

Animal welfare groups and municipal kennels and catteries are intensely busy. They operate independently with strong-minded leaders who have differing priorities.

It is understandable, therefore, why sterilisation campaigns in the Algarve have been sporadic, limited in scope and localised. There has been a lack of regional cohesion.

Sterilisation laws exist elsewhere in various forms. Some places in the US, for example, demand that animals be sterilised by the age of four months.

It would be culturally difficult to introduce and strictly impose such legislation in Portugal. But one line of thinking here is that if mandatory sterilisation is not possible then it must be made much easier to arrange. Incentives could include lowering licensing and insurance costs for owners of neutered animals.

It is increasingly hard to find anyone – individuals or organisations – willing or able to rehome animals. Facebook is full of applicants. There are simply too many abandoned dogs and cats in need of personal care.

Foreigner residents strongly support their Portuguese counterparts in animal charity work. And foreigners, including visitors, have been helping with the burden of rehoming by sending animals for adoption abroad, especially to the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands.

The problem here is acute but mercifully less abhorrent than last week’s BBC revelations that cruel puppy breeding is taking place in the UK on “an industrial scale”. A criminal trade in puppies reaping hundreds of millions of pounds has been booming with the approach of Christmas. Many of the puppies will become unwanted in the New Year.

Brexit, “calm and orderly”

In introducing the so-called Great Repeal Bill in the House of Commons last week, the UK’s chief negotiator in Brussels, David Davies, said the intention of the bill was to ensure “a calm and orderly exit” from the EU.

Only Big Ben remained quiet. It has been silenced for extensive repair work. But politicians of all stripes erupted furiously in a howling debate that heard the Great Repeal Bill denounced as a government “power grab.” The Independent newspaper warned that the bill was no less than a major “threat to democracy.”

The bill, which would incorporate relevant EU law into the British legal system, has also been described as an “astonishing monstrosity.”

Nevertheless, a majority accepted it in a midnight parliamantary vote. That’s not the end of the battle, however. Plenty more fierce argument over the bill lies ahead.

Calm and order have been noticeably absent since the outpouring of lies and distortion during last year’s referendum campaign, through the parliamentary political turmoil that followed, and on to the belligerent divorce proceedings now underway in Brussels.

Last weekend saw the start of the anti-Brexit “autumn of discontent.” Protest groups are demanding a rejection of the referendum vote.

Instead of feeling calm, British nationals living in Portugal and other EU countries can be excused for feeling rather anxious or angry, befuddled or just plain fed up with the pro-Brexit efforts “to make Britain great again.”

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get an accurate picture of what British expats in Portugal really think. For starters, it’s unknown how many of them are living here. Many remain unregistered, though there has been a scramble to apply for Portuguese residential permits to give a measure of security amid the mess unleashed by “the will of the people” back home.

Recent reports claim hundreds of thousands of retired Britons in Europe who cannot afford private healthcare abroad may be forced to return to the UK unless the government guarantees their healthcare will continue to be reimbursed by the NHS. 

It has been pointed out, however, that returning pensioners would be a drain on the NHS and the UK housing market as well.

Other reports have revealed a surge in the number of British pensioners wanting to move out of the UK and settle in Portugal, Spain or France, fearing the imposition of life-changing restrictions when the UK leaves the EU.

Concern among established British residents extends to those contemplating moving here permanently, as well as holidaymakers.

The pound has continued to plummet against the euro and more pressure is forecast, at least in the short-term. Analysts say sterling is heading for parity with the euro for the first time in the single currency’s 18-year history.

The exchange rate has prompted many would-be property buyers in Portugal to adopt a “wait and see” attitude. On the other hand, as Kerstin Buechner, director of QP Savills, specialalising in in the up-market Quinta do Lago and Vale do Lobo areas of the Algarve, has told us: “The loss in the value of the pound is stimulating our vendors (almost 100% of them) to reinvest in the local market as opposed to taking the funds back to the UK. This has most certainly contributed to our impressive sales volume this year of over €100 million, which has exceeded all our expectations.”

Many tourists have stayed at home despite the appalling weather in Britain this summer. Fortunately for Portugal, the big decline in British visitors has been offset by a significant increase in other nationals.

Many of the Brits who have spent their holidays in the Algarve this summer have been economising by buying more groceries in supermarkets and dining out less in restaurants.

Among long-term expats, there is still smouldering outrage that those who had lived here for more than 15 years were denied the right to vote in what turned out to be a close-run referendum.

Ardent pro-EU expats here are in touch with protest groups across the continent about what might be done to come up with a better solution than Brexit.

At the other end of the spectrum, some expats are contemptuous of the European Union. Yet it seems that many of these ardent Brexiteers want to continue living out here in the sun.

What lies ahead is as much a mystery now as it was during the referendum. It can still only be guessed at. Brexit may be disastrous for both the UK and the EU, or it may indeed help make Britain great again.

Meanwhile, for the UK and EU expats being used as “bargaining chips,” there is still no sign of agreement on their future rights, let alone getting to grips with the fiendishly complex matter of trade relations.

Instead of ensuring calm and order, all this Brexit baloney looks like bungling on and on and causing yet more chaos.

It may or may not be sorted by the time Big Ben strikes again - and that's not scheduled until 2021.

Angela Morado, a true professional

Angela Morado of the British Vice Consulate in the Algarve has been presented with an Honorary MBE, awarded to her by Her Majesty the Queen, in recognition of her significant contribution to relations between the United Kingdom and Portugal.

The award was formally presented by the British Ambassador to Portugal, Kirsty Hayes, at a reception on Tuesday in Portimão.

The Ambassador said in tribute: “Angie has proved herself to be a consummate professional in dealing tenaciously with hundreds of consular cases, and providing exemplary support to many distressed and vulnerable British nationals.

“Angie always sees each and every person as an individual, an essential skill in consular work, where each person has a set of unique, personal circumstances, even if the type of situation is one she has dealt with many times before.

“She has a seemingly limitless supply of empathy and compassion for fellow human beings, often facing up to the worst situation in their lives in a foreign country, sometimes alone, where they don’t speak the language or understand the norms”.

The Ambassador also noted that crisis response is another significant responsibility of consular staff around the world, and, in 2010, Angela was deployed to Funchal to assist British nationals caught up in the flood crisis there. With all communication systems down, there were huge challenges in making contact with British residents and holidaymakers in Madeira.

A year later, Angela went to Malta at one hour’s notice to assist with the evacuation of Libya during the Arab Spring crisis.

Angela Morado was born in Durban, South Africa. At the age of 18 she emigrated to Portugal with her parents and sister. Her father is Portuguese.

Angela was hoping to study fine arts but did not have the Portuguese language skills at the time to pursue a university degree in Portugal.

Instead, in October 1988, she started working for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the British Consulate in the Algarve, having been advised about the job vacancy by her previous employer, Zita Neto, Director of the language school Interlingua in Portimão. The British Consulate was just up the road from the school.

“I was interviewed by the then Honorary British Consul, Dr José Pearce de Azevedo, to whom I am ever grateful for teaching me the Portuguese I am able to read, write and speak today,” she says.

Having started as a consular support officer, she was promoted to consular assistant in 1994. With the retirement of her former colleagues Ron Underwood and Zefita Azevedo, she was promoted to Proconsul and then appointed Vice Consul in 2004.

She has served under seven consuls. Commenting on her MBE award, Roger Nuttall, the British Consul in the Algarve between 2000 and 2005, who now lives in retirement in England, said: “Among former colleagues in my 40 plus years in the Diplomatic Service, Angela Morado was simply the best consular officer I ever worked with. She was conscientious, professional, and wonderful with the public, British and Portuguese alike. I wish we could clone Angela for every consular job in the Service”.

Angela’s own reaction to the MBE award: “I am truly honoured for the recognition and proud to work for this organisation that has provided me with so many opportunities in my career to learn and develop and to travel.

“Above all it is the great job satisfaction I have every day in being able to help vulnerable people. Within the consulate we have a saying that “there is never a dull day” and this makes my job exciting.

“I have always worked with fantastic teams who have been supportive especially when dealing with the more complex cases.

“It is a luxury these days to be able to say that I get paid for the job that I love doing”. 

 Angela (right) with the British Ambassador

photo by Clive Jewell, the UK's Vice Consul in the Algarve. 

Relax, silly, it’s summer holiday time!

The tourist trick of grabbing the best available sunbathing spots by laying down early morning towels is said to have been pioneered long ago by the Germans, but they have met their match.

The competition used to be fought over poolside sun-loungers and the British learned to become even better at it.

Nowadays the beaches have become hotly contested battlegrounds and the Portuguese have become wily protagonists.

That is certainly the case on the long and lovely beach front by the high-rise resort of Armação de Pêra in the Algarve.

For the second year running, and despite much criticism and ridicule, many towels and sun-umbrellas are in place in prime positions on the otherwise empty Armação sands between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. each morning. They remain there, deserted, until mid-morning.

The pre-breakfast predators must wake up early or go to bed very late to ensure success.

Armação’s predominately Portuguese population swells from about 5,000 in winter to more than 120,000 in mid-summer. Tower blocks of vacant apartments suddenly become full when the holiday hordes descend from Lisbon and elsewhere in the north.

In August the beach becomes packed from one end to the other. Barely sardine-sized patches of sand are at a premium, especially at high tide.

And never mind the prolonged heat wave, high ultraviolet alerts and the danger of skin cancer. Live for the moment! Rising sea levels due to global warming may mean that within a few decades there will be no beaches or seaside resorts in southern Portugal at all.

The Brits, the most numerous of the foreign holidaymakers in the Algarve, used to compete with the Germans by laying down early morning towels emblazoned with the word “reserved”

Such Rule Britannia arrogance has been curtailed. Indeed, in Albufeira, just east of Armação, some holidaying Brits seemed uninterested in seeking any sunlight at all.

Having voted to leave the EU did not inhibit a festive “Portugal Invasion” of late-night revellers, some of whom became drunken louts on the rampage and requiring the attention of riot police.

More Brits than usual chose to stay at home this summer, only to be inundated by rain and unusually miserable weather at times across the UK.

Many of those who did come abroad his year have had genuine grounds to grumble about such things as the fall in the value of the pound and the long delays for non-Schengen passport checks.

There are plenty of other moans from visitors every summer, of course. Before early-morning towels and sun-umbrellas became an issue on Armação beach, one holidaymaker staying in a beach-front hotel had objected to the sound of the waves flopping on the shore. There’s no pleasing everybody. 

Dane plans to expand exotic exports

A resident Danish entrepreneur, Brian Knudsen, is looking to transform large tracts of unproductive land around Lagoa in the Algarve to considerably expand the quantity of special crops he has started growing and exporting from the area.

In May 2016 Knudsen obtained a 15-year rental agreement to take over 12 hectares of state-owned farmland between Lagoa and Sesmarias that had remained abandoned for decades.

Having carefully prepared the soil, installed an irrigation system and sown a type of sweet pea beloved in Denmark as snacks, he was able to harvest 15 tonnes of the healthy delicacy this March.

Since then, on the same land, he has produced large quantities of pumpkins and butternut squash for the Dutch and UK markets. Huge truckloads have been packed and sent northward in recent weeks.

Never before have crops like this been grown in Lagoa for export. And this is just the start.

The ideal climate and soils in the Lagoa area, combined with the demand for fresh produce in northern Europe, are why Knudsen is now looking for much more land, another 40 hectares if possible.

      He is seeking long-term rental contracts with private owners within  the municipality, preferably for land with access to Silves reservoir water channels, or at least where boreholes could be drilled to tap into underground sources.

Meanwhile, Knudsen’s team recently planted 15,000 more pumpkins for maturing in October. Special events are going to be arranged so that local children and families can come and pick their own pumpkins for Halloween celebrations.

Educating groups of children about the nature of agriculture and farming methods is high on Knudsen's agenda once his sowing and harvesting schedules both in Portugal and Denmark have settled down a bit.

He also wants to steadily progress towards organic production, focusing still on sweet peas, pumpkins and squash, but introducing onions and other crops deemed to be particularly healthy and increasingly in demand.

“We see a very bright future here,” says 40-year-old Knudsen who regularly travels to Denmark where he has similar business interests. He is planning to sell up there, however, and focus exclusively on the Algarve.

He and his Danish wife and their two children have been living in the Lagoa area since 2010 and this is where they intend to stay.

 

Brian Knudsen in his Lagoa pumpkin field

Loading butternut squash bound for Holland

Brexit spats over expats

The Brexit talks now underway in Brussels may end in no deal, says Britain’s chief negotiator, David Davis.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, says no deal would be “a very,very bad outcome for Britain.”

Prime Minister Theresa May, keeps telling us that no deal would be better than a bad deal.

Okay, so that’s all clear, isn’t it?.

Mrs May was equally clear last week in telling more than three million EU citizens, including almost a quarter of a million Portuguese, that her offer of rights to remain in the UK after Brexit was “fair and generous”.

The offer was on the table (if you’ll excuse the pun) at a dinner in Brussels featuring vegetable tart, monkfish and macerated cherries.

According to The Guardian, one of the few British newspapers you can trust these days, Mrs May left the room as EU leaders digested her proposals over coffee and mints.

“Fair and generous” were not the words used afterwards by European leaders. We can only speculate on any off-the-record remarks in foreign languages, but “below expectations”, was EU Council President Donald Tusk’s reported polite riposte.

Representatives of affected EU citizens were much more outspoken. They branded the British prime minister’s offer not only as “vague” but also “pathetic”. Far from being fair and generous, the offer portrayed them as “second-class citizens” and actually worsened doubts and anxieties, they said.

One of many things causing sleepless nights is the fear that Brexit will deny automatic citizenship to about half a million children born or raised in the UK .

Fully a fortnight earlier, the EU had offered a lifetime guarantee on current British expatriate rights, something the British negotiating team in Brussels failed to even acknowledge while warning that their “fair and generous” offer would depend entirely on a reciprocated response by the EU.

The British government finally unveiled details of their offer on Monday this week, which was a year late, and while continung to use people as “bargaining chips”, complained opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn.

A 15-page document revealed that the three million EU nationals in the UK will have to apply for a special “settled status” identity card if they want to stay.

Among the most noticeable omissions in the document was clarity on when the cut-off date begins (some time between March 2017 and March 2019) and the future rights of dependants of current EU residents in the UK.

The biggest stumbling block of all may be which courts – British or EU – will have jurisdiction in dealing with citizenship disputes.

     The detailed British proposals received a cool reception in Brussels. The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, tweeted rather disdainfully: “More ambition, clarity and guarantees needed than in today’s UK position.”

And yet this whole citizenship issue was supposed to be straightforward and easy, the preliminary bit before the two-year Brexit negotiations get down to the seriously complex stuff about trade.

The Brexit battle seems to have become bogged down before it has really begun.

Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of British expats in Portugal and a million elsewhere in the EU can only look on in befuddlement, and hope that the EU turns out to be fair and generous to them.

‘If you want to keep it, give it away’

Dermot Staveacre, who helped countless addicts in Portugal conquer their dependence on alcohol or drugs, has died peacefully in his home in the Algarve.

The old adage about life beginning at 40 was not far off the mark for Dermot Staveacre. For years he had been an alcoholic on a steeply downward spiral, drinking a bottle of whisky a day. By the age of 41 he was a down-and-out. He had lost his home, his savings, his job and his friends. On the edge of the abyss, he finally sought help in an English treatment centre.

That was 35 years ago and that is how long he remained a non-drinker. For most of those years he continued helping other alcoholics and drug addicts make the same life-saving adjustment he made.

Central to his work in Portugal as a counsellor was a conviction first voiced in the mid-19th century by an American psychologist, Benjamin Rush: alcoholism is an illness with the same basic characteristics of other illnesses. It has a cause (alcohol), symptoms (loss of control) and a way to recovery (abstinence).

“This is the crux of the whole problem. In its simplicity it is as true today as it was 150 years ago”, Staveacre said.

“Addiction to alcohol or other mood changing substances, like heroin, seems to be hereditary and it seems to effect about 10 percent of the population. It has nothing to do with poverty or riches, intelligence or stupidity, being good or bad at sports.

“If you put 10 students in a room and fed them all heroin, nine would emerge not wanting it again and one would become an addict.

“Because those addicted to heroin are suffering from chemical dependency, were heroin not available to them it is probable they would become chronic alcoholics 10 or 20 years later”.

Staveacre agreed that there is a grey area between the social drinker and the full-blown alcoholic. The difference is in the symptoms.

“The alcoholic cannot go into a bar and say, ‘ I’ll have two beers’. Normally he has no control over the amount he drinks. But it goes much deeper than that. If a drinker puts alcohol before his work, his finances, his family, his health or the law, it is probable he is an alcoholic and has lost control of his life.

“Limiting or controlling consumption for an alcoholic or drug addict is impossible in the long term. Recovery from addiction is only possible through total abstinence”.

If the illness is in the genes, all it needs is a trigger. The problem then invariably goes from bad to worse until a point of crisis is reached. Most – perhaps 90 percent or more - die of cirrhosis of the liver, overdosing, accidents of one kind or another, or suicide.

Of the individuals who survive, “there needs to be a crisis which leads them to willingly to accept help”, said Staveacre. “An alcoholic or addict will continue so long as it is more comfortable to continue than to give up”.

He estimated that alcohol or drug addiction at any one time affected more than 30,000 people in the Algarve, but most wanted to cover it up.

“I knew a foreign couple who lived in the hills behind São Brás de Alportel. She would drive down into town to buy her husband the booze because she was afraid he would crash the car. It would have been better if he had crashed the car, because then he would have had to face up to the consequences.

“In my own village there are two men, both working, who spend all the money on heroin, while their mothers, both widows in their 70’s, house them, feed them and clothe them. While the sons live in this sort of comfort they will continue to be addicts”.

Staveacre worked closely with families and loved ones who needed education, guidance and counselling as much as addicts themselves.

“What I try to do is help people face reality. But, of course, it is more comfortable to talk about a problem than to do something about it”.

With support and the vital ingredient of personal commitment, addicts can turn their lives around remarkably quickly – in a matter of weeks. There again, it may be easy to stop drinking or using drugs. The difficult bit is staying stopped.

“If 100 alcoholics go into treatment, probably only 60 percent will complete the course and half of that 60 percent will be drunk within hours of leaving”.

Naturally, Staveacre saw a good deal of human misery but he was very upbeat about his work because, he said, “there is the other side of the coin – the people who get into recovery and start living quality lives”.

After training and working in England for several years and spending time at the Hazelden Foundation, a precursor to the Betty Ford clinic in Minoso in the United States, Staveacre ran a drug rehabilitation centre near Castelo Branco in central Portugal. He went on to make regular visits there to counsel counsellors.

In the Algarve he saw clients privately in his home in Pêra. He believed his own recovery from alcoholism gave him an advantage over other trained specialists.

”I can read the mind of an alcoholic or an addict much more easily than a psychiatrist or psychologist because I have been there. I don’t need to know the answers to questions like, why do you do it?

He was a firm advocate of the philosophy and methods of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. In helping others, members help themselves and refresh their own commitment. Staveacre recalled that delightful Zen-like saying: “if you want to keep it, give it away”.

After 27 alcohol-free years, Staveacre suddenly found himself faced with an illness of a very different kind. A serious heart problem was diagnosed and he was taken to Lisbon where he underwent a quadruple bypass operation.

“I’m still in denial about it”. he said with a smile some time later. “They open the chest cavity, deflate the lungs, take out the heart and put it on a slab, stick you on a life-support system, tear a vein out of your leg, cut it into bits, put the heart back in, inflate the lungs, put everything together up and down with steel clips and give you a 30-year guarantee. I feel almost as well now as before I went in”.

He died peacefully in his home on 9th June at the age of 76. Family and friends from the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland will join the local community at his funeral service in Pêra on Friday 23rd.

•   See an obituary in the Guardian newspaper here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/21/dermot-staveacre-obituary