Above photo: Chance after his surgery. Photo supplied.
Katina Pollard was out walking her ten week old puppy, Chance, earlier this month, when they encountered another couple walking their dog. “The couple commented on how cute my puppy was,” says Pollard in a letter to council. “I slowed down to have a quick visit when their dog violently attacked both me and my dog, putting both myself and my puppy, Chance, into extreme distress.”
She says Chance was seriously injured in the attack, sustaining a fractured femur on his front left leg. “I grabbed my puppy and got home as quickly as I could and took him into the DC Veterinary Clinic immediately. The cost of this bill was just over $800 and he’s currently in surgery which is looking to be close to $3000–4000.”
Pollard says things like this happen, but in this case, she says, it could have been prevented. “The dog who attacked me and my puppy is a known risk to the community, deemed as ‘dangerous’ and is required to wear a muzzle at all times, yet wasn’t wearing one while around children, and other bystanders!”
According to Pollard, this dog attacked a child in town earlier this year. “May I remind you that a child not long ago was killed by a viscous dog attack in Alberta!”
She says she spoke to the District bylaw officer, who went to speak to the owners, who didn’t deny what happened. The couple was given a series of fines totalling about $1000. “For the last two nights I’ve been up taking care of my puppy, making sure he’s out of pain, I’ve taken several days off work now to make sure he’s loved and well taken care of. The emotional toll this has taken on my family, and what’s to come is extremely frustrating, to say the least.”
More than that, she says, it seems wrong that she has to pay close to $5000 in vet bills, while the owners of the dog that attacked her only has to pay about $1000. “I am not satisfied with the current outcome,” she writes. “A $1000 fine is absolutely abysmal! This pathetic fine is a drop in the bucket compared to the vet bills and rigorous therapy my dog will now have to go through to make sure he’s not reactive in the same way as the other dog.”
She says this was a dog that was required to be muzzled. “I’m just wondering, who is accountable for this? Clearly the ‘dangerous dog’ sign and ‘hefty’ fines aren’t getting through to this negligent dog owner. I’m now terrified for my friends who take their dogs on walks. The dog issues in this town need to stop! The wandering, the random dog posts, it’s been completely of hand and needs to be addressed NOW!”
She says she is the sort of person who wants to bring forward solutions to problems, but for now, she would be happy with some form of compensation for the vet bills. “My husband has now reached out twice to the couple with no response. We are now left with a $5000 vet bill plus the many months of therapy ahead of us, but yet the town collects $1000 here, $1000 there and the dog remains unmuzzled.”
Council debated the issue at the November 11 Policies and Priorities meeting of council. Council Norbury says the bylaw—which was passed in April of this year, replacing the previous bylaw, which in turn was only four years old—is pretty good, meeting a lot of the things it needs to do. “But we’re finding out it needs to go a little farther,” he says. “What happens when a dangerous dog—a dog that has been shown to be dangerous—attacks people, or other dogs. We need to add something to this about what happens when all our current precautions fail. There’s got to be a point in time when fines aren’t enough. I’d like to see something more. Do we contact the SPCA to come and take that animal away, because now they’re a danger to the community? Or maybe something as simple as giving people a pamphlet that outlines their rights as a victim of a dog attack. And then the victim of the attack, or the SPCA, can petition to have that dog put down. People need to feel safe in this community. They should be worried about bears, not dogs.”
Director of Protective Services Dustin Curry says the District is also able to petition the court to put down a dangerous dog. He says the town falls into a gray area in terms of the SPCA, as Tumbler Ridge is not a part of the South Peace SPCA, but in a rural area of the province. “We don’t deal directly with the South Peace or North Peace SPCA directly unless we are asking them to take an animal that we have in our holding facility and we’re looking to relocate it. Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have access to information and a working relationship with the South East BC SPCA, but not at the level where we are talking about having them come to Tumbler Ridge and pick up an animal or deem it dangerous or do anything like that.
Councillor Hofman asks if the town has to worry about liability if they ask to have a dog destroyed. “Does the owner have any recourse against us? I worry about even giving victims a pamphlet. Are we sending people down a path that would open ourselves up to liability for the consequences of that?”
He says he’s not happy with the idea of dangerous dogs running around town without muzzles. “So I’m open to suggestions.”
He also asks what it would cost the District to destroy a dog.
Curry says he’s not aware of the actual dollar value. “I can say that if we were to deem a dog as being dangerous, and we were to the point of considering this dangerous dog be euthanized, the dog would be seized by the District and in our possession. We would not allow this dog to be a public menace or a danger to the public before it went through the court.”
He says this could mean a lot of overtime for the District, as employees would have to care for the animal after hours, but as the District has never done this before, he does not know what the cost might be in terms of legal fees.
Councillor Gulick suggests some tweaks to the wording of the bylaw. “It says the District may provide. I would like to see that change to must provide the owner with written notice that the dog has been designated a dangerous dog,” she says. “And then I think that there needs to be some steps in there that talk about when they give notice, that owner then signs something that says that they’ve been notified. What I took away from this incident is that we didn’t have enough steps to follow. We don’t have what is our expectation of council to staff, that they need to be checked up on this many times. Or what happens if the dog isn’t muzzled or kept under control in public.”
She points out that it’s not just dogs that can be problematic. “I think we need to be cognizant as we bring this bylaw forward that we also have to think the other nuisance animals we might have in town. Mostly I’m thinking there could be cats that are nuisance cats.”
But ultimately, she says the District has a responsibility to remind owners of nuisance animals what their responsibilities are.
Mayor Krakowka agrees they need to look at the word ‘may’ and how many time it appears in the bylaw. He asks what happens if the owner of a dangerous dog fails to renew their dog licence.
“This is a newer process for us,” says Curry. We’re trying to navigate this as we’re moving through it. So in March of this year, when we did the amendment, we didn’t have a section in our application for a dog being dangerous, nuisance or high risk. So we may have had individuals that were coming in and going, ‘yep, I have a dog.’ We have those records over at the fire hall, but not at town hall. So we’ve changed our forms and we’ve made some administrative processes to try and capture these animals. Is there still work to be done? Absolutely. We recognize that. So now we are getting to the point of sending out reminders for every animal, whether that’s dog or cat, nuisance, high risk or dangerous. Now we have the information on file so that we can send out those notifications. So moving forward, we will have that information for a license issue on file, and so we can issue tickets for lack of licenses. We give a grace period for January. But after January 3, we can go back and say, ‘hey, you haven’t done this, and for every day that your dog is not licensed here’s your fine.’”
Of course, he says, bylaw enforcement can’t be everywhere all at once. “We cannot see this dog every time that it leaves its property. We rely on the public to give us information about those dogs. That is why we have signage as a requirement for those animals. If that animal leaves, we are aware of it.
The flip side to that is now in this amendment, we also have the requirement for an additional tag to be put onto high risk and dangerous dogs. This is a yellow tag, it’s larger than the other one, it’s about three inches in diameter that goes onto high risk and dangerous dogs, so that from a distance you are able to tell from a distance if that animal meets those criteria. And if they are not muzzled, we want to hear from the public on those things. We want to know when that actually occurs so that we can make those follow-ups with those owners to ensure that those compliance are met.”
Councillor Klikach asks if the RCMP should get involved in this? “They get involved with somebody hits a moose, breaks its leg, they go out and shoot it. It’s not much different than some dog running around biting people. There should be something that we can do that will get somebody out there, and within an hour that dog is gone. We are not just fooling around. You know that dog is going to get out there and going to bite somebody else. So I think I think we’ve got to put some meat in this thing, because if it gets a hold of a kid, who’s going to wind up responsible? Maybe it’s the District. Maybe we get sued because we didn’t follow through and make sure that these animals weren’t here.”
Curry says that the RCMP are involved, especially with after hours calls. “Quite often because bylaw only operates during normal business hours from Monday to Friday, the RCMP do take on a lot of the after hours calls for these things. And quite often, when they do attend these, they immediately will call me and say, they have a situation with a dog, and I will authorize the overtime for the bylaw officer to go out and attend the investigation with them. If there is an imminent public threat—if the dog is actively injuring someone, the RCMP can take matters into their own hands. They can follow whatever procedures that they have in place to deal with that situation and mitigate the emergency.”
Councillor Klikach says he’s just worried the bylaw doesn’t go far enough. “I feel that we don’t have the teeth in here that is required to fix the biting situation. A person shouldn’t even be allowed to have a dog like that. It doesn’t make any sense to have a guard dog or a biting dog in a town situation. You have them out on the farm, but not in town. We really have to look into this and see what we can do because if one of your kids gets hurt, it is going to be a serious thing.”
Councillor Noxana says she wants to see more things done to mitigate the risk to the public. She says she understand’s councillor Klikach’s desire to have no dangerous dogs in the community, but she doesn’t think the town can or should apprehend every animal that could have this designation. “One idea is to have insurance policies mandatory, paid for by owners of dangerous dogs. I’m not sure if this is possible, or where you would get that type of insurance, but if it were mandatory, it might deter people from wanting to keep that animal. It would be another avenue of removing these animals from our community or having some sort of assurance to the public that if a situation like what happened, the injured party have some sort of recourse to pay their bills.”
She also suggestions periodic inspections, something the bylaw department is already doing, but not frequently. “We usually do inspections at the beginning when we ensure that there is a compliance and then potentially maybe once a year,” says Curry. “But it’s definitely not at a frequent scheduled interval.”
Councillor Noxana says having regular inspections make the issue front of mind. “Hopefully, it would sidetrack that complacency that some owners may get into when there is no follow-up for two years. I’m not sure time-wise what burden that would be on staff, though. I also wonder is there a way that follows dangerous animals to other municipalities, so we can ensure the public when owners move out of our municipality?”
Curry says that owners are required to notify municipalities when they move into or out of a location. “However, we are not the only municipality dealing with dangerous dogs,” he says. “So much so that the Local Government Compliance and Enforcement Association actually has developed and started to implement a dangerous dog registry for the entire province. This was done as a pilot project, but it’s now starting to get some traction. We can actually upload pictures and information. If we do have chipped information, we can put that in there,. To my knowledge, it has not taken off widespread, but we have been looking at developing this and how to put this into our own administrative procedures.”
After a long discussion, Council made a number of motions for potential amendments to the animal control bylaw.
These included: adding a section for nuisance, and dangerous animals, not just dogs; adding a section regarding breeders of animals; adding a provision for the seizure of a dangerous dog after a human, or animal attack; adding the provision of requiring insurance for dangerous and at risk dogs; adding timelines in the Bylaw to have dogs registered as dangerous dogs to be checked in on to confirm they are still within the community; removing grace period for renewal dangerous dog licenses in the community; adding a requirement of dangerous dog owners provide proof of ID of their dogs for the DTR to upload in the a provincial dangerous dog database; and requiring all owners of dangerous dogs to undergo dog training.
Note that these amendments are not in place yet. Instead, staff will be looking at the implications of these potential changes, from potential legal implications to potential additional staff time.
And as for Chance? Pollard says the experience was quite the journey. “But in the end, I’m incredibly grateful for Chance’s clean bill of health and his joyful puppy energy! A huge thanks goes to the DC Veterinary Clinic for accommodating Chance on such short notice.”
She says the way the town came together to help her was especially heartening. “I’m thankful to all my wonderful neighbours who came together to help me, drove me into Dawson Creek, and checked on us throughout his recovery. Their support means the world to me.
“My main concern has always been for our community’s well-being. Since the incident, there have been over 20 dog wandering posts on Facebook, and that’s 20 too many. I hope that when the public engagement happens, our community will come together to discuss how we can make Tumbler Ridge a safer place for everyone.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
