Mr. Conor Dowling:

First of all, the dog wardens would not have any involvement in that area at all, really. If I am walking down the street and I see somebody walking a dog with cropped ears, I could speak to them and ask them about it. To be quite frank, however, unless there is some evidence that he or she committed the offence, it is probably a pretty pointless task.

The Deputy mentioned dogs being imported. I would say it is very much not the majority of these dogs that are imported. That is the kind of standard explanation that is offered straight away. The reality is that they are being done here. The procedures are being performed here. People are trying to make it appear that they are imported. We have had people importing passports from other countries where it is legal, along with microchips, and then microchipping Irish dogs and passing them off as imported dogs.

The people involved and most of the people who have these dogs are aware that it is illegal. If I approach them and ask them, they are not going to hold their hands up and admit that they were involved somehow. They will offer one of these excuses. Unless we can prove otherwise, it is very difficult to do anything.

There are certain situations where we can do something at present. We have a number of cases ongoing where we were able to act on information we received to identify puppies with recently cropped ears, which we could demonstrate were in the possession of these people post and prior to the procedure. There is also the suffering aspect in that they were caused suffering and did not receive veterinary care afterwards because, of course, a person cannot bring a dog that has just had its ears removed to a vet and expect not to be reported. That is the difficulty at the moment with walking along the street with a dog that has had an illegal procedure performed on it. We cannot prove any offence on that. The short answer is that it really cannot be addressed by anybody.