Spain’s 1st national animal welfare law takes effect

OVIEDO, Spain

Spain’s first-ever national animal welfare law took effect on Friday, which mainly changes legal obligations for pet owners.

It is now illegal to leave dogs alone for more than 24 hours or to leave them tied up unsupervised in public spaces. If someone is caught leaving their dogs to wait outside while visiting a store, they could receive fines of between €500 and €10,000 ($530 to $10,600).

“Leaving an animal tied up for a minute to go and buy bread isn’t a problem, but leaving them an hour in the sun to go into a mall is because they can get dehydrated and face risks of getting abused or attacked by another dog,” Nuria Menéndez de Llano, head of the Observatory for Justice and Animal Defense, told Spanish daily El Pais.

Under the law, all cats will have to be sterilized and microchipped before they are six months old unless they have special breeding permission. Cities will be making sure that feral cats are spayed or neutered.

As of Friday, all dog, cat, ferret, and bird owners must identify their pets in local registries.

These measures aim to reduce people abandoning their animals. Spain is the European country with the highest rate of animal abandonment — an average of 800 per day, according to Jose Luis Macias from Iberanimal.

The law also stipulates that animals like cats or other pets can only be left home alone for a maximum of three days.

No animal will be allowed to be habitually kept on balconies, porches, or storage rooms, or always be tied up outdoors.

Hunting dogs or other canines “used professionally” are excluded from the law, after political pressure and lobbyists forced the government to backtrack their original plan to include all dogs.

The law also includes several measures that cannot take effect due to a lack of legal clarification. For the moment, Spain's government cannot pass the needed legal decrees providing the details because it is only an acting government, unable to pass that type of law unless it's an emergency.

Pending measures include making all dog owners take a mandatory training course as well as buying third-party insurance to ensure their pets are treated for diseases as opposed to being abandoned or left to suffer.