Large Fierce Mammal

As promised, I’m back with the first in a new series – Dog Days. Unlike my annual Dark Sentiments and A Long Winter’s Night segments, Dog Days will run intermittently for as long as it needs to. It will focus on municipal dog control legislation and its impact on the realities of dog ownership, examining specific case histories along the way.

Canada is a nation sorely needful of the kind of unified legal thinking necessary to formulate humane, reality based, enforceable community standards defining what is, and is not, acceptable when dogs and people live together. “Dog control” bylaws, created and enforced by municipal governments, form a ramshackle patchwork quilt from coast to coast. For clarity though, I need look no further than my own figurative back yard, and we’ll deal exclusively with illustrative events that occurred, or are occurring, inside of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia – the very county in which Mrs. LFM and I reside.

This series has been simmering for some time, but got its seminal kick in the ass because of Sarge, the Rottweiler I wrote about in my 14 August 2011 article, Muddy Waters. If you haven’t already read that, please do it now before continuing.

A lot has happened since that article went up. Sarge was returned to his owners, but not before Mrs. LFM and I were retained to assess him to determine if he should be. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to our report that defines our involvement:

On 27 June 2011, Sarge, an intact male Rottweiler dog approximately 3 years old was involved in a bite incident on a 5 year old male child, Connor Purvis.

The dog was subsequently deemed fierce and dangerous in accordance with the dog control by-law of the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg, seized by the Municipal Dog Control Officer, and housed at a kennel in a neighbouring county, where he remains pending a court decision on his fate. His owners including their children are permitted to visit, and do so regularly to exercise and play with him.

Golden Mountain Dog Solutions was retained to perform a behaviour assessment on Sarge to determine if he is predisposed to displays of aggression, or other undesirable traits that might represent a danger to people he comes into contact with. We were also provided with a document package containing police reports, photographs of the victim’s injuries, and witness statements generated in the wake of the incident. These were reviewed in the light of our professional experience with, and expectations of, canine behaviour, and the results of our examination of the dog involved. Lastly, we were asked to recommend measures and/or conditions we felt appropriate to preventing a similar event if Sarge is released to his owners.

The report detailed our assessment protocols which included not only hands on work with the dog in question, but also an examination of witness statements, evidence photographs, and the incident scene to establish the timeline and the activities of all participants from start to finish. The details are a subject for another day, but our recommendations were that Sarge be returned to his family under specific conditions, wrapping up with:

There is nothing with regards to more training that would have made ANY dog bullet-proof under such conditions.  We do not feel it is necessary for Darren and Kelly to undertake further training with their dog, but it is imperative that they keep working with him. Isolating a dog, even one that has been fully socialized, will make all that good socialization disappear. Dogs need to be continually exposed to people in order to remain social. Dogs that are isolated are much more likely to bite than dogs that aren’t. This cannot be stressed enough!

And finally:

We conclude that this bite incident was an unfortunate and preventable accident, and see no reason why Sarge should not be returned to his family, with the recommended measures in place to prevent further incidents. We also see no reason for the “fierce and dangerous dog” designation to remain on his record. He is no more fierce nor dangerous than most other dogs would have been given the circumstances and sequence of events.

Sadly, since Sarge’s return, he was a party in another alleged bite incident involving a telephone utility employee who entered the property without permission or prior notice. Unlike the earlier case in which it was claimed that Sarge attacked the child, which he absolutely did not, the person involved in the second case alleges that Sarge charged at him and, at one point bit him, and as a result of that complaint, the dog was seized once again. There is a lot wrong with the way this all played out, including, but not limited to, conflicting witness testimony, and the fact that, as I write this, Sarge is once again home, begging the question of why he was seized again in the first place. He now has two court dates pending, and before those arrive we will be delving more deeply here into every aspect of his situation, and others like it.

Nothing in Sarge’s case is cut and dried, but one thing is certain – he is now the focus of attention and handling that holds every possibility of setting him back socially, making him progressively more vulnerable to a lethal end result. He and his family are now living under a microscope as the days tick down to the first of two court dates, the outcome of which might just eliminate the need for the second one by eliminating Sarge. His case highlights a vulnerability shared by all of us who own dogs, and the dogs we own.

Dogs can’t speak for themselves. As to people reporting on any given situation, some are right, and some are wrong. Some are mistaken, and some are outright lying. Eye witness testimony is so horribly inaccurate that investigators to an emotionally charged event need a large enough sample of statements to permit sifting for common threads and glaring anomalies. It’s absolutely crucial that enforcement actions taken in the wake of an incident involving a dog be constructively aimed at establishing the facts without doing further harm in the process. I am certain the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg has no intention to do harm to Sarge or his family, and let me be clear at the outset that this is not going to be a series of articles attacking them, or any other municipality located in this county. What we will be doing is highlighting the pitfalls that presently exist with an eye to making recommendations for change. Stay tuned.