CHICLANA is a town near Cadiz. A few hundred eople, roughly 400 according to the estimates by the Peña Galguera Santa Ana (galguero club) enjoy, as a hobby, training galgos for competition.
Traditionally, they have trained them in El Fontanal, the Pinar público and the Cañada la Asomada, making them run behind their motor scooters on a course of about 15 kilometers in length.
Now they are denouncing the Seprona for not letting them train in these traditional areas because, according to their information, they say that “they border on private land”.
That’s why, the president of the association of galgueros, José Gallardo, criticizes that “the bad habits of a few affect the hobby of the rest of us galgueros who respect the traditional training areas, and of course, the animals”.
“Previously they made numerous requirements for the dogs and, as you can see we comply with them, now reckless driving is being argued as an excuse to prevent us from training. We commit ourselves to circulating with our motor scooters totally within the law and respecting the rules”, explains Gallardo.
“They have even told us to train on bicycles but that can’t be because there are many elderly people who share this hobby and they take it away from them like that”, he adds.
For all of that, the club is looking for solutions and one they are considering is to create a galguero license, with the seal from both the club and the city council that would become a type of contract by which the member would be compelled to comply with a series of rules.
The non-compliance of such would harness the immediate revocation of the permit and the sanctions that would be imposed on them from competent authorities.
All of that, only a couple of months away from the celebration of the very important national championship in which many dogs have already been registered from all points of Spanish geography.
“Normally we celebrate at the beginning of November but this year we don’t know what we are going to do because we can’t train”, explains Gallardo.
“What we want is a run in a straight line about 15 or 20 kilometres so that the dogs get their exercise as they always have, without bothering anyone”, concludes the president of the Peña who thanks the city council for “the cooperation offered in all of the negotiations taking place to solve this problem”.
The Kimba Refuge, a Spanish group working to stop cruelty to galgos in Spain, responded.
The galgueros are very angry because the the seprona (division of the Guardia Civil in charge of nature conservancy) will not allow them to have galgos, with ropes around their necks, running alongside the motor scooters of these mindless morons.
According to the press, the city council of Chiclana is willing to help those poor galgueros to continue to abuse those even poorer animals, and it does not matter to them in the least the suffering that they endure. Since they can’t vote, they don’t count for anything, and in the news it does not mention either that those galgos finish exhausted, since they have no opportunity to stop.
Some of them die of heart attacks, others are run over by the motor scooters of those nitwits who are pulling them by force. And many of them end up with their paws destroyed, the same as the ones who are abandoned or killed because they didn’t serve the needs of the galgueros as they should have.
In other places no one would pay any attention to petitions such as this one, but in these parts everything counts and the animals continue to be last on the list to receive official help.
Here, what is important is the beauty, the tourism….. But it’s blind tourism, where the truth about where they really are is hidden. In Chiclana, aside from it’s sand, sun, beaches, first rate hotels, etc.
There exists an underworld where animals suffer, where there are chained animals who spend their whole lives like that, where they are treated as if they were heads of lettuce, where sick people hoard dogs year after year and no attention is given to the well being of the woman, and they let those animals rot.
Where, too, there are massive abandonments, where animals have to hide because there are “brave ones” who, with their hands on a steering wheel, try to run over the poor abandoned dogs in “Sancti Petri”, the area you can see in the photos.
Now the galgueros are becoming defenders of animals. You’d need to ask them the age of their oldest galgo, and what was the future for their older galgos, and then we would all know with whom and of whom we are speaking.
What they do need to know is what is considered a violation of the laws for the protection of animals in Andalucia, and a violation of road safety laws, and therefore with or without their permits from the Chiclana city council, they would all be in violation and indictable.
If the galgueros should say that there are 400 of them, there are 600 of us at the SPAP KIMBA (society for the protection of animals of Cádiz KIMBA) alone, as well as many friends from several countries who are not willing to help in the mistreatment of animals, and we speak, and we denounce, and we vote for those who have no voice.
Please contact the following and praise them for Chiclana’s stand against cruelty and ask them to ensure that the welfare of the galgos continues to be taken seriously in order that the good name of Chiclana does not become associated with cruelty to animals.
This is the well reasoned press article that came out in the in the Diario de Cádiz in the section for Chiclana de la Frontera (Cádiz)
15/08/2007 02:52 ISABEL BERMÚDEZ
Copied from the Greyhound Action website.