Whydid thesedogs dieafter rompingon thebeach?
DAVID LEAFE investigates a growing scandal . . .
LITTLE kerry Crook’s most faithful companion used to be her family’s muchloved mongrel, Dave.
Today, five years after his death, her most precious memento of him is his dog collar, kept in pride of place around the neck of her favourite teddy bear.
Like the rest of her family, kerry, who is now ten, misses Dave badly. Elsewhere in their house on the outskirts of Plymouth, her mother Fiona has his ashes in an urn in a cupboard.
‘one day i’m going to buy a nice plant for the garden and sprinkle them around it,’ says 39-year-old Fiona. But she admits that it might be a long time before she can face that task.
‘i give Dave a little thought every day and it’s still hard because of the circumstances of how he passed away.’
Those circumstances are the stuff of every pet owner’s nightmare.
one afternoon in February 2013, Fiona and her eldest daughter Lucy, who was then 13, took Dave for a walk on their local beach at Mothecombe in Devon.
a cross between a Staffordshire Terrier and a Lurcher who had been adopted from a local rescue centre, Dave was very much part of the family.
Fiona’s heating engineer husband Stephen sometimes took him to work, and Dave and Lucy had competed together in agility contests at local dog shows. ‘Dave had all the speed and bounce of a true lurcher with all the loyalties and friendship of a Staffy,’ says Fiona. ‘He was an unusual looking dog but gorgeous in every way.’
When they arrived on the beach, Dave was one of many dogs racing over the wet sand when, from a distance, Fiona noticed him stop to pick up a brick-sized lump of something wax-like and white.
‘i thought it was a gull and ran towards him shouting at him to drop it,’ she says. ‘i looked at it and wondered what it might be, then we continued on our walk.’
although she gave it little thought as they enjoyed the rest of their day, she now believes Dave ate a lump of palm oil — a pollutant cargo ships dump into British waters with scandalous impunity.
This week, in response to a Freedom of information request from a national newspaper, the Maritime and Coastguard agency (MCa) revealed that ships regularly release large quantities of it into our seas with no fear of prosecution.
in 2016 and 2017, there were seven instances of palm oil contaminating our waters. Two oil slicks were each about 45 miles long. But no action was taken because international law currently allows vessels to flush palm oil out of their tanks if they are more than 12 miles offshore, as all these vessels apparently were.
Ships sometimes sluice out their tanks after making a delivery to clean away any residue. By washing liquid leftover palm oil out into the ocean, they save themselves the cost of having it properly dealt with by an onshore facility. That it later coagulates into the solid lumps washing up on British beaches seems to give some ship owners little cause for concern.
FIONA CROOK finds this unforgivable. Understandably so, given what happened to her dog, Dave. The day after visiting the beach he started vomiting — the contents of his stomach, strangely, smelt strongly of diesel.
Within two days — despite being taken to a vet and referred to a specialist clinic in Somerset — Dave was dead.
‘His liver and kidneys had been horribly damaged,’ says Fiona. ‘They did everything they could for him but he didn’t make it. We were devastated then and still are.’
and the Crook family are far from alone in mourning a pet that died a needless death because of palm oil, which is the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet.
Made from the fruits of the widely grown african oil palms, it is found in about half of all packaged products in supermarkets, an ingredient in items from ice cream to instant noodles, and margarine to make-up.
The global market is booming; currently worth £47 billion annually, it’s expected to rise to £60 billion by 2022. However, there are concerns over its rapidly growing use.
not least is the devastating impact on forests cleared to make way for palm oil plantations.
The World Wildlife Fund says an area equivalent to 300 football fields is destroyed for this purpose every hour. There are particular worries about the environmental impact in Borneo and Sumatra, the South-East asian islands that are home to the world’s only population of orangutans, a critically endangered species driven to the brink of extinction as its natural habitat is destroyed.
in itself, palm oil is not toxic, but it is naturally sticky and can become covered in contaminants while floating far out at sea. These can be dangerous to dogs who find the smell and taste of the fat highly appealing and unwittingly consume the harmful ‘toppings’ too.
among these is the diesel oil that international law also allows ships to release in small quantities. That explains the smell Fiona Crook noticed when Dave was first ill.
Seven months after Dave’s death, in September 2013, Lucy Garrett Peel from Warminster, Wiltshire, was on holiday in Cornwall with her husband alexander and youngest daughter Cicely, then 14.
Lucy and Cicely were walking their miniature schnauzer Zanzi on Marazion beach, near Penzance, when they saw her swallowing a marble-sized ball of solidified oil.
‘She started being sick as soon as we got home,’ says Lucy.
anti-vomiting medicine didn’t help so they took her back to the surgery where further examination revealed a hard white lump in her stomach, later identified as palm oil. Zanzi died that night.
Lucy recalls: ‘When you have a pet, you’re responsible for another living being and there’s the feeling that you have let it down. i turned away for a minute to look out to sea and that’s all it took.
‘it was terrible seeing Cicely so upset and it was awful for my other two girls who were away working and at university at the time.’
Such grief is something Carla Clark, of Baldock in Hertfordshire, is all too familiar with.
in September 2015, Carla, 36, who runs a business hiring out vintage china, went for a weekend away with her partner, kevin Hensby, a 38-year-old bricklayer.
With them on that trip to Caister, on the norfolk coast, were their sons Jake, Tiaran and Lusionus, then 13, eight and six. So, too, were their dogs — Wolfie and his younger ‘brother’ Fury, both a rare wolf-like breed known as a Utonagan.
During their first walk on the beach, Carla noticed Wolfie digging frantically in the sand, something he never usually did. on the way back, he was violently sick. only then did Carla notice a sign warning about palm oil on the beach.
a local vet advised Carla to take Wolfie home to her own vet as soon as possible but he never made it.
Wolfie was on the back seat of the family car when Carla heard him making strange sounds.
‘i pulled over on the hard shoulder and that’s where Wolfie took his last breaths in my arms,’ she says. ‘it was a noise and a moment i won’t ever forget.’
Like Fiona Crook and Lucy Garrett Peel, Carla is keen to share her story to highlight the dangers posed by palm oil. and anyone who doubts it is still a problem on Britain’s beaches only has to take a walk along some of the most beautiful stretches of our coastline to be convinced otherwise.
Take Formby, Merseyside, where the national Trust website boasts of ‘a glorious beach with dramatic sand dunes, surrounded by coastal pinewoods . . . home to a wealth of rare wildlife’.
Last november the beach was where more than six tons of palm oil washed up in a week, with two reported cases of dogs eating it.
one, a Labrador named Molly, belonged to Martin Beecroft, 61, from northwich in Cheshire.
ALTHOUGH she survived, after they rushed her to a surgery run by Vets now, which provides emergency care for pets, Martin has since taken to social media to spread the word about palm oil and they have not exercised Molly on any beaches since.
‘The fact that it’s being released legally is outrageous,’ he says.
This week, councils in Thanet and Sandwich in kent, and Seaford, East Sussex, issued warnings about palm oil on their beaches. and the death toll is still rising. The Veterinary Poisons information Service recently learnt of a dog that developed pneumonia after vomiting brought on by eating palm oil. The dog later died.
So what do the authorities intend to do about the problem? regulations in place already ensure that, after unloading, ships wash as much residual palm oil out of tanks into disposal facilities on land before setting back out to sea.
and this week the international Maritime organisation (iMo) said the requirements for these washes are to be made more stringent, admitting they have not been strict enough in the past.
Good news, except the changes are unlikely to become law until 2021 — another three years in which dogs walked on British beaches run the risk of becoming poisoned pets.