Adjudication No. 1447  (adjudicated December 2009)

The Press Council has upheld a complaint against The Herald Sun over a July 21 feature article dealing with animal cruelty, which concluded that more than 100,000 dogs and a similar number of cats were euthanased in Victoria every year. The article said that exact figures were "hard to get", but appeared to draw substantially on the advice of an animal rescue and rehabilitation charity in arriving at the 100,000 estimate that was highlighted as a supplement to the headline.

A strong theme of the article was that too many pets are being sold that are either unwanted or are producing unwanted puppies or kittens, and the writer attributed this to "a loophole in Victoria's laws" that allows commercial operators - unlike pounds and shelters - to sell pets that have not been de-sexed.

The complainant, Dr Harry Corbett, a veterinarian, said the article grossly inflated the number of dogs put down each year. He said credible sources for animal welfare statistics were available in Victoria, and that these indicated a figure considerably lower than those given by the feature writer. Dr Corbett also argued the case for compulsory de-sexing was flawed because only 25 per cent of puppies were bought from commercial suppliers and around 90 per cent of Australian pet owners already have their pets desexed. Dr Corbett's attempts to contact the newspaper to have the figures corrected were unsuccessful.

The newspaper said that the journalist had drawn on "sound and reliable sources" upon which to base her analysis, having interviewed managers from reputable animal shelters and hospitals as well as the animal rescue charity quoted in the article. Dr Corbett said that the journalist's analysis of the figures provided by those sources "demonstrated the triumph of woolly thinking over simple arithmetic".

While the Council is not in a position to arbitrate on the merits of the sources from which the statistics in the article emerged, it believes that a response to those statistics from Victorian animal welfare authorities would have ensured a better balanced article, and reduced the risk of what appear to be very misleading figures being published.

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