00:00It's puppy playtime at the dog park, a place to burn energy and get social.
00:07But what's now a choice for dog owners may soon become a legal requirement.
00:13The ACT government wants to mandate owners spend a minimum of three hours with their dog every day.
00:20It's a move the RSPCA supports.
00:23I think a lot of pet owners spend far more than three hours with their pets.
00:28Dogs are so social and just having that moment of being in that same room with you is definitely meeting some of those basic behavioural needs.
00:37Some owners feel the proposed update to the ACT's dog welfare code is unnecessary.
00:43It seems a silly rule only because if you are a dog owner you'll spend more than three hours a day with your dog.
00:51We spend one hour at the dog area and then yeah pretty much we're leaving.
00:56It's not just human contact hours the government wants to have a say in.
01:00Tying dogs up would be more heavily restricted as would surgical debarking.
01:05And retractable leads could also be prohibited under the draft standards.
01:10They don't allow you to have a full effective control of your dog.
01:13They're hard to get your dog back in.
01:16I don't use a retractable lead but I think it should be up to the individual.
01:21Breaching the welfare code's standards is a punishable offence.
01:25But questions remain about how some of them would be enforced.
01:29I don't know what kind of policing is going to be employed to carry out to ensure everybody does that.
01:38It sounds very interventionist.
01:40How are you going to monitor me being with my dog three hours a day?
01:44They're questions that authorities in the only jurisdiction to recognise dogs as sentient beings will need to decide.
01:51They do feel emotions, they do have feelings, they do process things very similar to us.
01:56The new code is open for feedback from the public until mid-August.
02:00atta Cixote been released on COVID-19.
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