Germany’s culture war over animal welfare 

Germany doesn’t have a national animal, but if it did, it might well be the dachshund. 

When Germany hosted its first Olympics after World War II, it chose a dachshund named Waldi as its mascot. Today, dachshunds’ long, skinny silhouettes are a kitschy adornment to Germany-themed swag from T-shirts to coffee mugs, often wearing the black, red and gold of the German flag.

On a sunny Sunday in September, a dachshund parade put on by the dachshund museum in the medieval city of Regensburg drew thousands of fans.

For many of them, plans to change Germany’s animal welfare laws to limit breeding of dachshunds have hit a nerve.

“My heart would break,” said Annabelle Schultes, standing at the start of the parade with her husband, Frank Schultes, and their dachshunds, Paul and Nia. Her grandparents, parents and siblings all have dachshunds, and Paul, now 14, was Frank Schultes’ wedding gift to her.

Dachshunds are famed for their sausage shape, but their extra-long backs and extra-short legs can create crippling strain on their spines. This animal welfare bill would ban what it calls “torture breeding” — the breeding of animals with structural disabilities — not just of dachshunds with bad backs, but German shepherds with bad hips or French bulldogs with breathing problems.

Dachshund owners say they’ve got the problem under control, and that a breeding ban, rather than helping, could doom the dachshund. More than 18,000 people have signed a petition against the bill, and the national dachshund club has mounted a pressure campaign on legislators.

Tatjana Euler, pushing a stroller carrying dachshunds Streusel, Paulina and Twinkie, said the bill had politicized her as never before.

“[The government] should better shut up,” she said.

The bill isn’t just about dog breeding. It is meant to protect all kinds of animals in places from livestock farms to circuses to slaughterhouses. Germany already has one of the world’s strongest animal welfare laws, with animal protection written into its national constitution. Some 90% of Germans support stronger legal protections for animal welfare. That makes the debate more complicated than a simple for or against.

Schultes admitted that while her dachshunds don’t need new laws to protect them, other animals might.

“Pigs and cows are living a hard life sometimes,” she said. “It has to change.”

Farmers disagree.

“Are they suffering?” asked Hans Steiner, waving a hand toward the 71 cows munching hay, resting or just milling around his breezy, quiet dairy barn in the foothills of the Alps.

By contrast, a million German cows spend most or all of their lives tied in one place. The new law would end that, along with other livestock farming practices like dehorning calves without veterinarian-administered anesthesia and cutting off baby pigs’ tails.

Farmers say the bill will drive them out of business, and like dachshund owners, 24,000 of them signed a petition to stop it.

Steiner said that farmers care about their animals, too, but the suffering addressed by the bill only exists in people’s heads. One example: a calf Steiner dehorned himself, two hours before, now standing quietly in his cage. 

“He’s fine,” Steiner said. 

Farmers know best how to care for their animals, he said, and the government should mind its own business.

Except, that is, for “torture breeding” of dogs — that has to end, he said.

“Everybody agrees it’s important to protect animals from unnecessary harm. But what that specifically means, is very, very much contested,” said Marcel Sebastian, a sociologist at the Technical University of Dortmund who studies human-animal relations.

In Germany, those relations are complicated. Livestock farming is big business, even as meat and dairy consumption sink to all-time lows. Add growing political polarization and dwindling support for the Green party to the mix, and the animal welfare bill sponsored by the Green agriculture minister — a vegetarian, no less — lands in a messy kind of culture war.

Ahead of the dachshund parade, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called on authorities to stop it, saying the stress would exacerbate the suffering of animals already afflicted by “torture breeding.” Instead, thousands of people — and their dogs — turned out for what amounted to a barking, growling show of force.

As 1,175 dachshunds took to Regensburg’s cobblestoned streets, the parade set a world record. The head of the national dachshund club told German newspaper Die Zeit that if the government messes with its dogs, it’ll set another one — next time, outside the Parliament in Berlin.