They say that people in authority should lead by example. Somebody should try explaining this to the Munxar local council in Gozo, which has seen fit to lay a concrete pathway along the pristine cliffs at Tas-Sanap. Nobody at the council bothered to get permission from the planning authority for this, and it seems that nobody at the council even knew that permission is necessary if you want to spread a couple of tonnes of concrete along a cliff-top.

Planning authority officials went for a look-see on Saturday after the alarm was raised by concerned citizens. They have issued an “enforcement order,” which means that what is done has to be undone, or else. Well, that’s a laugh, for sure. Have you ever tried ripping up a concrete road – paths are more than a little narrower than this thing – and making it like it was never there at all? I’ll tell you, it’s impossible. Only a few centuries of nature left to run its course will do that – if at all.

It’s hard to work out whether it was ignorance or arrogance that led to this exercise in unbelievable crassness. It’s probably a mix of both. It’s the second time this kind of thing has happened in the isle of strange occurrences. Some years ago, another bunch of councillors decided to replenish one of Gozo’s most picturesque little beaches with fresh sand – except that the ramel they chose was the kind that builders use.

Because the word for beach-sand and builder’s sand is the same in Maltese, they assumed that the natural product has exactly the same qualities and properties as the man-made one. Chaos ensued as bathers and their possessions looked as though they had been frolicking on a building-site. But that was as nothing compared to the water, which was – well, have you ever tried stirring some builder’s sand into a bucket of water?

It’s nice when people in public life use their initiative to get things done, but there’s a good reason why permits are required. One person’s idea of an improvement to the public sphere may run contrary to the established view. The Munxar councillors might have thought it was so terrific to have a ruddy great road-like path running along the cliffs that nobody could possibly object. They found out too late how very wrong they were.

I can’t understand what that path is for, anyway. It’s not as though any sensible parent is going to take the kids out there on a bike or skateboard.

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Just as there are copycat suicides, so there are copycats murders and other copycat acts of violence and aggression. A bomb attack will lead to others (we saw this in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Malta). An arson attack will inspire others to do the same (we saw this in Malta over the past year). One stabbing makes the news and other stabbings follow. One man shoots his wife with his hunting-gun, and some time later, another man shoots his neighbour. It’s the reason why suicides are not publicised – one suicide is reported, and in the next few days, there are others.

The more highly publicised the case is, the more it catches the imagination of people, then the greater the likelihood that there will be copycat occurrences. When Saddam Hussein’s hanging was in the news for so long, I thought to myself that it was only a matter of time before some psychopath used the inspiration, though it was hard to see how.

Then I found out, when the news broke of the “hanging” of three pharaoh hounds in Gozo. Having owned one such dog, and knowing what a powerful struggle they put up against any attempt at restraint, I thought it unlikely that they were killed by hanging – more likely, they were killed and then hanged, which accounts for the presence of the pipe used for bludgeoning them. The male, at least from what I could see in the photographs, appeared to be hanging by the upper jaw, rather than the neck.

Nobody seems to have made the link between this macabre incident and the fact that hanging was all over the news just before it happened. To my mind, it’s perfectly obvious.

The newspapers are making a fuss about this and seeing it as yet another example of cruelty to animals. I think they’re missing the point. Dogs are shot, beaten to death and poisoned by farmers all the time. Farmers do not see this as an act of cruelty, but as the simple act of killing an animal, like killing a chicken, a sheep, a goat or a pig. More accurately, it is like killing a rat, because the average farmer hates dogs with a fervent passion. He will kill without a second thought any dog whom he sees once too often crossing his field, or whom he suspects of damaging the plastic tunnels which cover seedlings, or bothering chickens. The average rural person thinks that all this fuss about dogs is crazy, and can’t understand why urban people differentiate between killing dogs and killing, for example, rats or chickens.

On the other hand, people who live in an urban environment do not understand that rural people will feed poisoned meat to a dog on the sly, or shoot it and then dump the body or burn it, rather than asking its owner to keep it under control. Why do they do this? Because the owner might not keep it under control, and then, once they have asked, they can’t kill the animal because they will immediately be suspect.

Curiously, hunters have more feeling for dogs than farmers do, the reason being that lots of them keep several dogs, and they don’t keep them tied up and neglected in a field-hut, like a living warning system. Hunters’ dogs are often killed by farmers who don’t like them running across their fields. They lay traps for them and then find them and shoot them.

The reason this dog-killing – one of many thousands of dog-killings, please remember – should be investigated is not for killing per se, but to identify the person who did it so that the forces of law and order can keep an eye on him. Killing dogs, sad to say, is normal in rural areas and does not point to any perverted or cruel streak in the nature of the person who does it.

Try to explain to a man who spends his life killing chickens and goats why killing a dog is wrong or immoral, and he will nod and go off thinking you’re nuts. Dog-killing would indicate cruelty in an urban person because urban people are taught to distinguish between the morality of killing certain animals and the morality of killing others. Making a perverted spectacle of the killing, however – as in the case of the Gozo pharaoh hounds – does indicate a psychologically twisted streak in the character of the person who did it. This probably means that he has the capacity for dangerous violence, towards people too, and that he enjoys it.

Those calling for stiff penalties for this dog-hanging are extremely naïve. Before you can have a penalty, you must have a conviction, and there can never be one in this case. Even if the police and the dog-owner know beyond doubt who did it, where’s the proof? There are no witnesses, and there is no evidence. The police must still try to find out who did it, but the only reason is that this person might well have been involved in other violent crimes, or may go on to commit them.

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Please stop calling it a tal-fenek dog. That’s the colloquial name in the Maltese language. The official name of this breed – and all dog breeds have official names – is the Pharaoh Hound. You may not like it, but that’s how it is. Ideally, it should have been called the Maltese Hound, because that is exactly what it is, but it’s too late for that now. The breed known officially as the Maltese, sad to say, is a horrible yappy little terrier that has little or nothing to do with Malta. How much better it would have been if this glorious hound were called the “Maltese.”

I wish somebody in authority would sit up and take notice of the breed and give it some form of official recognition. It certainly needs official protection, like other indigenous species of flora and fauna. The Pharaoh Hound, bred in large numbers by specialised kennels in Britain, the USA, France and Germany, is dying out in its natural home, Malta. While the island is teeming with advertisements for exotic puppies like Alaskan Malamutes or Old English Sheepdogs, it is almost impossible to buy a Pharaoh Hound. Tell me about it: I tried so hard some months ago when ours disappeared, and then ended up getting something else.

The clearest indication that the Pharaoh Hound developed in Malta over many centuries is that it is almost completely resistant to sandfly fever. Every other breed living in a rural or semi-rural area contracts the virus immediately the sandfly season starts, unless it is kept indoors after sundown. The Pharaoh Hound has adapted to Malta’s sandfly-ridden conditions, and it takes centuries of selective breeding for that to happen. It is precisely because it is so resistant to sandfly that it has survived here in a state of virtual neglect over hundreds of years. The sandfly virus, if left untreated, destroys dogs quickly.

I suppose it is a good metaphor for the Maltese way of looking at things that we prize dogs bred for Alaskan, Siberian or German conditions and pay extraordinary high prices for them, while the Pharaoh Hound is found mostly living in abysmal neglect on farms, often starved and beaten. Malta’s own hound is one of the most prestigious and costly dogs in the world – everywhere except Malta, that is. But why are we so surprised? The same thing happened with the Maltese variety of orange, which is now grown commercially in Tunisia, Morocco, Spain and Florida, but has virtually disappeared in Malta itself.