Dear Reader/Querido lector, the referendum to leave the European Union is now ten years old. I have been living part time in Spain since then, an outsider in a small southern town, looking back at England. Each set of postcards in this series will ask the question in different ways, “Is it true, ‘En el sud, la vida, en el norte, el dinero?” Are our values, our attitudes to life, money, work, family, power, animals, food, conversation, boundaries, ‘outsiders,’ immigrants and refugees, so different? By looking at our lives here in Sussex from (one particular) southern European standpoint do we learn anything about ourselves and the changes in our lives since Brexit? Each set of postcards begins with a revealing story…
¡Mi querido lector, Juno and Gloria are missing! They’ve run off into the mountains. Let me catch my breath… We were walking up there in the wilds above the village. One on, one off the lead, as usual – you know what terriers are – about to load them back in the van, one must have heard something and off they tore. It’s been three days. Hunting season starts tonight. The men are already drinking in the bars, their dogs behind bars on the trucks ready for the off. What are we to do?
Later.
Their pictures are up on the Policia Locale website. People are texting in with sightings, but no-one has got near enough to pick them up. The forest ranger is coming to help search as are friends and neighbours. If we don’t find them this evening before the hunting dogs are let loose… Oh, I can’t send this to you… not unless it ends happily. I mean let’s hope the end is swift… Hasta Pronto.
Mi querido lector, it’s nearly midnight now. We were up on the high track on Vulture Mountain – we could hear the hunters baying, the boars digging and rustling in the prickly undergrowth, burying themselves as much as they could. It was awful. We were turning away down the mountainside, filthy, scratched, in tears – only to see Gloria, the wire haired foxy, lapping quietly at a stream trickle, not a care in the world. I picked her up, her normally dry and ratty rescue dog hair was soft and sweet smelling. She’d been on an adventure, at home in the wild.
But where was Juno? A sweet Border boy, he isn’t wild wise. Waiting by the van for the ranger to join us and call off the search, it’s pitch and silent. We don’t want to turn on torches and draw the hunters to us. A crunch of boots on the stony scree, and it’s the ranger. He’s carrying a limp Juno in his arms. Battered, bloodied, two front teeth missing, back legs torn – but alive. It is 9pm. We call the vet who leaves his home to re-open the surgery. Juno is now sedated, asleep in his basket, Gloria wrapped around his back. Hunters and helpers… the two sides of the coin in this small, rural community… Hasta Pronto.
Mi querido lector, Juno is recovering apace. He’s lost his toothy grin and limps a bit, but otherwise he’s his old playful self. The two of them are local celebrities, people stop, smile and pet them as if babies. More people now live with small dogs as part of the family.
When I moved here ten years ago, a walk in the countryside meant startling every few minutes as unattended, anguished dogs, barking furiously, threw themselves against fences. It is only since the Animal Welfare law 2023 that animals have been legally recognised, across the country, as sentient beings. Abuse and abandonment are now criminal offences. Shockingly late in the day?
In the UK, early animal welfare laws from 1822 were designed to protect cattle, dogs and cats from cruelty. But it is only since 2022 that vertebrate animals have been recognised as sentient beings under UK law. Invertebrates are still not covered. The Spanish law covers neither bull fighting nor hunting or working dogs – and this is a bull running and hunting town. More later, got to take the dogs out. Hasta Pronto.
Mi querido lector, we’ve a long way yet to go in Spain to recognise animal rights. Animals are still routinely abandoned. Animal rescue shelters are run mainly by UK citizens who are Spanish residents. There is little tradition of formal volunteering here. Helping is a more spontaneous affair. A neighbour suggested we go to the local police to report the dogs missing. The desk staff immediately stopped what they were doing and posted photos on their website. As the day wore on, more and more sightings were posted.
The local ranger stopped his forest patrols to join us in the search. A friend who works for the roads department took time off to help. The vet reopened his surgery without charge. In the UK over half of all adults formally volunteer at least once a year. This compares with a growing trend in Spain of currently only 10% of over fourteen-year-olds. Civil society is more organised in the UK than in Spain which tends to be more relaxed and spontaneous, based on family and community networks.
What I have come to realise in this ten years of living part time in southern Spain, the ten years since Brexit, is that lines between work, social and private lives, boundaries in general, are generally softer here than they are in the UK – and especially so since Brexit has hardened our arteries.
Until the next set of postcards from Spain, Hasta Pronto.
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