Large Fierce Mammal

Back on 21 October 2010 while the first incarnation of my now annual Dark Sentiments series was in full swing, I wrote an article about the Wendigo phenomenon. Part of that contained the facts, as they were then known, in the strange case of Tim McLean wherein his head was severed from his body and partially devoured by Vincent Weiguang Li on the night of 30 July 2008. Li has been a guest of Her Majesty since then, has been declared not criminally responsible by reason of insanity, and currently resides at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre in Selkirk, Manitoba.

According to an article titled Vince Li speaks for the first time, published to the CTV news website on 11 May 2012,

Last week the Criminal Review Board ruled in Li’s favour to take supervised walks into Selkirk. Li says he understands why people are against it and afraid of him.

“I understand people are scared because of my behaviour on the Greyhound bus,” says Li in the released interview. “I am not at risk for anybody…. I don’t hear voices. I would call my doctor if I heard voices again. Yes, I understand their fear.”

Li says he is glad to be taking his medication everyday saying it makes him feel better.

“I would be glad to be under a treatment order because medication helps me. It is very important. I don’t want to do what I did ever again,” says Li.

As you will see if you read the article, it goes on to include the contents of a 45 minute interview with Li that was conducted on 19 May 2012 by Chris Summerville, CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada – one of many such encounters  conducted at approximately bimonthly intervals since Li’s arrival at the Selkirk facility in 2008. I would like to focus on two specific parts of that interview. In his opening statements, Mr. Summerville observes,

I have decided that Mr. Li’s story needs to be told, to add a human touch to a horrible tragedy. What we have here are two victims and two families who are victims of untreated, uncontrolled psychosis.

And he concludes with,

As we ended the interview I could see the moisture in Mr. Li’s eyes. It is remarkable the insight Mr. Li has. It is even more remarkable the positive effects of the medication. Up to 25 percent of people who will have a psychotic break with reality will never experience another psychotic episode. Up to 65 % will experience a degree of recovery in order to live a meaning life. 10% will take their life by suicide due to the losses associated with schizophrenia. Of the 300,000 people in Canada who live with some form of schizophrenia, the vast majority lead quiet, law abiding lives hoping for some quality of life. People living with schizophrenia are more likely to be victims of violence rather than being perpetrators of violence. Schizophrenia is treatable. Recovery is possible.

In our work in dog rehabilitation, and most particular in those cases where a dog has bitten a human, it is the norm for the dog’s owners to fear more occurrences, and possibly escalation. In most cases, the behaviour that led to the bite found its birth in one source – human ignorance. And rather than rehabilitation, it often finds its solution in one source – lethal human intolerance. Embroiled as we presently are in finding the path to reforming municipal dog control bylaws, I can state with no small amount of authority that even one dog bite complaint can, and routinely does, result in seizure of the animal in question. The power also rests within such bylaws for the dog to be destroyed without any requirement for professional assessment or any level of investigation beyond the contents of the complaint itself. So, while most such bylaws contain a stipulation that will forgive a bite that is delivered under provocation, the cases we have so far examined contain absolutely no element that might be considered an attempt to understand what that particular dog might consider to be a bite worthy provocation in the specific situation prevailing at the moment the bite was inflicted. The dog bit someone. Kill it.

We never hear from the people who set out to intentionally imprint human malice on their dogs, however it is not uncommon for the people in whose care a dog bite situation was unwittingly cultivated to decide they don’t have it in them to fix what they, themselves, have broken. Even with professional assistance, and presentment of a clear path leading out of the valley of the shadow, they simply are not up to the challenge, and no amount of education, wishful thinking, remorse, or self-loathing will change that. There is absolutely no dishonour in facing your own limitations and coming to realistic terms with them. There is only dishonour in just giving up on a dog and making excuses for the indelibly soul staining sin of it. In these cases, we can help with rehoming the dog because its situation has come from a need for handling skills that transcend those it has experienced up to that point in its life. Several of our own dogs are shining examples of how successful this can be.

Then there are the ones who were a part of creating the problem but won’t be a part of the solution. They can recite an endless litany of excuses to explain why they can never find the time to supervise and maintain the social skills of their dog, usually centered around the demands of career and children, and have thereby successfully crafted it into a neurotic creature lying somewhere between a ticking time bomb and a walking antipersonnel mine. All too often, these people will consult with us, half-heartedly go through the motions of rehabilitating the relationship, fail miserably by pushing too far too fast in pursuit of immediate gratification, and then announce that they would feel terrible if the dog were to die, but after much soul searching they just don’t believe they are the right fit.  They seek our aid in rehoming it only to run headlong into a grim reality – the past months, and sometimes years, they let pass that could have been put to use turning the situation around, have severely limited their options. They have created a monster that can never be certified as safe to move on, so they can now either commit to working with the behaviours themselves to reach a manageable level they can live with, or they can end it now. We can assist and support them in either course, but we will not sign off on such a situation and assist in simply moving it on to a new venue. To do so would be professionally and socially irresponsible, and unconscionably inhumane. The number of people with the necessary skills and resources to accept a commitment of this magnitude for the lifetime of such a damaged animal is regrettably very small indeed. Such dogs will also not do well in an animal shelter where time, skills, and resources are in even shorter supply, and even so called “no kill” shelters, including our own local SHAID, have an automatic euthanasia policy on one bite episode.

I see parallels between this latter group and the way the case of Vincent Weiguang Li is being handled. Mr. Li is clearly a very damaged man who has killed another human being in a horrific manner. He says his motivation was voices in his head that told him Tim McLean was an alien, although the fact that he found alien head parts so delectable has yet to be explained. He is now sufficiently medicated to quiet the voices in his head, sufficiently savvy to have successfully convinced his keepers that he is, or some combination of both. Insane is not the same as stupid. In dog rehabilitation, we use a process called early pattern recognition, or EPR, to identify the triggers that set a dog off, and thereby read the signs that lie between the preparatory and execution phases of an aggressive response. In short, while the process may be brief or drawn out, a normal dog that is simply acting out of bad handling will exhibit signs that a skilled handler can read, each giving insight into its mental state. Dogs do not lie, which is why our normal consultation process begins with interviewing the human part of the equation, and then turning to the dog to learn what’s really going on. Our human clients rarely actually lie, but their truth will be more affected by interpretation and emotion than that of their dog.

In my professional life, I have had personal experience with no less than four diagnosed schizophrenics who repeatedly went off their medication for the simple reason that they felt so good they decided they didn’t need it anymore. Predictably, each one required repeated institutionalization to get back on track, but in each case the cycle kept repeating itself. Fortunately, none of these people were homicidal nor cannibalistic, although one became incredibly violent whenever she went off the reservation. Each was repeatedly released to live in their home communities, their medication allegedly “supervised”, but yet the observed effect indicated no effective supervision whatsoever beyond what I delivered by way of a police unit with handcuffs.

All of this, my years of experience as a professional dog behaviourist, 30 years as a security consultant, and 17 years in emergency communications running the dispatch centre serving two police jurisdictions and five fire districts, leaves me finding absolutely no comfort in the words of Chris Summerville. While the people caring for and assessing Mr. Li did not create the monster that killed and partially ate Tim McLean, they have control of him now, and no amount of re-branding him in the role of co-victim in the events that played out on the bus that night, no amount of subtle softening by way of referring to him as “Vince” in public statements, no amount of recited statistics, would make me sign off on his ever seeing unfettered life again, even under a muzzle and leash order.

Work with this in-house for the rest of his life, or curtail what’s left of it. There are no other options.