Harvey, we will do right by you.

The goal was to reach 100,000 signatures in the Harvey’s Law ePetition before 17th March. Before last weekend was over, we surpassed it!

The objective – to request Parliament to enforce a formulated process ensuring that Highway Agency Departments abide by the following:

– compulsory scanning of all domestic animals retrieved from the highways.

– log report filed and circulated to both Police and Dog Warden.

– photographs of the deceased to be held with the log report to be used for identification purposes.

This has been dubbed Harvey’s Law – a campaign that began after teacher Jude Devine’s poodle went missing during a visit to friends in Liverpool in November 2013.They searched for him every day. They enlisted help from everyone they knew and who didn’t know. They reported his being lost, they created a Facebook page, they gave rewards to him being found. Jude, 43, from Sheffield, South Yorks, spent more than £8,000 on leaflets and lived in a caravan to be close to search the area.

Due to the vast effort made to find Harvey, a “highway patrol officer” connected the dots and realised the body of a poodle-like dog that was found on the M62 could have been Harvey.  He sent a Facebook message to Jude.  That was in February 2014, almost 13 weeks later.  The body was found approximately twenty minutes after Harvey went missing.

Harvey had a microchip and a collar tag. Yet there were no written records to show that the Highways Agency had scanned Harvey to locate his owner. Highways Agency Chief Executive Graham Dalton admitted in a letter that the contractors had not made ‘sufficient effort to inform other authorities or locate the owner’.

Since then, Harvey’s Army, a group formed out of trying to find Harvey, had launched an effort to find out what, if any procedure is in place for found dead animals. On further investigation, using the Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Highways Agency, it has revealed plans to phase out the procedure to scan pets killed on the roads across the UK – by July 2015.

According to a Highways Agency spokesman this was in response to the requirements of Government’s Spending Review 2010.  That Highways Agency has been awarding a new type of contract that maximises efficiency and value for money for the taxpayer, without compromising road user and road worker safety.  As a result mandatory policy for handling canine fatalities has been eliminated.

Nina Blackburn of Harvey’s Army, who started the petition said: “For members of the public to have to go out and scan dead animals on the roads, on a voluntary basis in order to ensure that the owners are informed is outrageous.  The procedures are there, the money has been spent, it takes only a couple of minutes to give the owner that closure.”

For a nation of dog lovers (25% of all households own a dog) – this is a pathetic conclusion. It is also inconsistent with the mandatory rule that all dogs must be microchipped.

May’s comment: The petition has gained momentum and a voice of the usually quiet dog lover is speaking loudly.

100,000 signatures is needed by the 17th March for the petition to be considered by the Backbench Business Committee.  Even though this has been achieved (101,000+) we need more just in case some of the signatures are rejected – and also to give the message that it is a matter that is close to a lot of people’s hearts.

Please join us in making this a law. Please share this with every dog owner you know in the U.K.

If you haven’t signed the petition, please click on this link and ensure that we are on our way. ePetition for Harvey’s Law

We’ve written to our local MP to garner his support for the law.