The man who is a dog's best friend

By WARREN GAMBLE

It's not so easy being a dog lover at the moment, agrees Bob Kerridge.

"It's a worse time to be a dog," says the public defender of animal welfare for the Auckland SPCA for 18 years.

Kerridge has been walking a difficult public relations line over dogs in the past two weeks, after the vicious attacks on children, including Auckland seven-year-old Carolina Anderson.

Kerridge says he understands the anger of people worried about vicious dogs running loose. He also sympathises with the distress of responsible owners fearing their pets could be legislated against.

"Our first concern is animals but it doesn't mean we lose perspective," says Kerridge. "There is no place in the community for dangerous dogs, and certainly people should not be subject to attacks."

In 1987, he led a campaign against importing pitbulls, which - because they are bred to fight - are the only breed the society specifies as dangerous.

He believes the Dog Control Act has enough teeth, but says standard laws should be applied nationally instead of through different councils.

For example he believes dogs should be kept on leads in public places except in an adequate number of specified parks where they can run.

The society has long advocated tougher penalties for the owners of dangerous dogs, microchips for dog identification and registration for owners to provide education and sanction.

Kerridge does believe that children also need more education because many attacks occur after unwitting provocation.

And speaking for the dogs - Kerridge has made a career as a human-animal go-between - he says the suggested muzzling in public places of breeds such as german shepherds is ludicrous.

He hopes that when the dust settles there will be sensible laws and an acceptance that most dogs, even big ones, are gentle and faithful companions.

Kerridge should know. He has owned more dogs than you could shake a bundle of sticks at, right from the age of nine when, while he was marooned at home with some horrible childhood disease, his mother plonked a golden ball of fluff on his bed.

He named the golden cocker spaniel Rusty - the show-business flair which produced the name Woofstock for a fundraiser hadn't emerged yet - and it became an inseparable friend.

"For the first time in my life," he wrote of Rusty recently, "my heart responded to a relationship and I learned how to love. It is a lesson I would never forget."

Kerridge's last dog was called George, a neglected Yorkshire terrier he took home from the SPCA for an overnight stay and who never left.

George's teeth were falling out through neglect, so his bark was definitely worse.

"He gummed everything, including me," says Kerridge. His death four years ago "took a fair part of me with him."

He has not had another dog since, but he and his second wife, Michele, now have four cats.

So, the inevitable question - is he a cat person or a dog person?

"I'm an animal person," says 64-year-old Kerridge with Kofi Annan-like diplomacy. "You knew I'd say that."

He is often asked that question by followers on both sides of the cat-dog divide, and he tells them that he loves both for different reasons.

Dogs because they are paragons of faithfulness and come when you call; cats because they are extremely therapeutic and have minds of their own.

Kerridge isn't worried about being called an animal nutter, although no one has done it to his face.

He acknowledges his views that animals have souls, share many feelings that humans have and should be treated accordingly may sound "rather radical and all a bit ethereal".

"But it's that linking with the animal that motivates animal people. Because the animal gets inside them basically, takes a bit of them emotionally, and likewise that's returned.

"A lot of people will say come on, they're animals, they walk on four legs and they can't talk. But I believe there is a greater affinity between people and animals, and I think the world is waking up to all sorts of things".

It can go too far. Women whose homes are overrun with 30 or 40 cats and who go without to feed them, the wills which leave it all to the SPCA and ignore the children.

"Some people tell me they love animals much more than people. I think oh dear, you poor soul, it shouldn't be like that."

Kerridge was born into a privileged Auckland home, son of cinema magnate Sir Robert Kerridge, of Kerridge Odeon fame.

His father's example as a businessman and a charity benefactor inspired him to follow a similar path.

His commercial career took him through stints in insurance, inevitably the cinema industry, and into his own advertising and marketing companies.

He met his first wife, Iris, in London and the couple had four children before her death in 1994.

At one stage on their South Auckland farm they also had 16 cats, four dogs, a donkey and a talking bird.

In the mid-1980s, anticipating the arrival of video-recorders, Kerridge launched Sportronic, a ping-pong game played on television. It soared in its first year but then bombed, leaving Kerridge with an idle factory and unemployed staff.

Kerridge believes, like his father's vision of a 22-storey skyscraper which authorities scaled down to the seven-storey 246 building in Queen St, the game was launched too early.

After a year's sabbatical in England, he returned to New Zealand in 1985 and saw the job as the SPCA's Auckland director advertised.

Kerridge set about using his marketing skills and the show business style absorbed from growing up with films to raise the society's profile, vital for an organisation which gets no Government money.

The lack of such support can be inequitable, he says - councils get subsidies for impounding healthy stray animals, the SPCA gets none for looking after sick ones - but it has its advantages.

It has allowed him to speak his mind on animal welfare issues without worrying about biting the hand of financial backers.

In 1988 he led calls for Governor-General Sir Paul Reeves to resign as patron of the society after he was present at the ritual slaying of two pigs in Vanuatu.

In 1997 he led the charge opposing the Kaimanawa wild horse cull, which he says was done to protect "precious native weeds". He continues to clash with politicians, environmentalists and farmers on "overhasty" decisions to declare some animals pests and eradicate them.

On his own future, Kerridge says he will continue "as long as I feel I'm of benefit to the animals."

At the SPCA's Mangere centre it is kitten season, and bundles of fluff fill four cages at the cattery. As long as they pass medical and behaviour tests, all will stay here - the same goes for dogs - until they find homes.

Kerridge says he does not get depressed about animals abandoned and those which have to be destroyed.

"You can't afford to, you have got to look at the positives that they are better off," he says, balancing two caramel-coloured kittens on his shoulders.