City animal bylaw’s bark worse than bite

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/10/2002 (8428 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HERE’S a dog-bites-bureaucracy story for you. Question: What can city animal control officers do about a dangerous dog that lives in Winnipeg, but does its biting in Birds Hill?

Answer: Bark a little, maybe.

But it seems the city’s dangerous dog bylaw is missing a few teeth.

Or so the people at the pound are learning as a result of a recent multiple-bite attack on a 15-year-old Birds Hill girl named Nadia Bubnowicz.

Last week, acting on a tip that followed a Free Press story about the unprovoked Sept. 19 attack, East St. Paul police located the owners of the two dogs involved in the off-leash attack on the walking trails beside the Birds Hill quarry.

The owner of the Husky-malamute cross that did the biting has since voluntarily signed a document declaring her pet a dangerous dog.

According to Dave Prud’Homme of East St. Paul bylaw enforcement, the woman wanted to spare the traumatized victim the ordeal of testifying.

Both dog owners involved in the incident have been charged with bylaw infractions. The woman owner of the Husky-cross faces a charge of allowing her dog to run loose and “wound.”

The male owner of the other dog faces a run-loose charge.

The maximum penalty for the wounding offence in East St. Paul is $1,000.

Prud’Homme decided against seeking a destruction order because it’s the first reported biting offence, there were no ripping and tearing wounds, and the dog’s owner has promised not to take it back to East St. Paul.

Not seeking the doggie death penalty isn’t unusual.

There were no execution orders issued in the city of Winnipeg last year, and there rarely are.

Nevertheless, the Husky-cross case has exposed a loophole in the city’s bylaws that appears to leave Winnipeg’s Animal Services Agency on a very short leash.

The newly declared dangerous dog may live in Winnipeg’s north end, but because the attack didn’t happen within the city limits and it has no priors here, the Husky-cross — and I do mean angry — is an untouchable.

“The bylaw refers to Winnipeg only,” says Tim Dack, the head of the Animal Services Agency.

The city can’t even insist the dangerous dog wear a muzzle when its owner takes it to one of Winnipeg’s 11 off-leash park, as she does.

At least that’s how Dack reads it.

Dack expects to seek the advice of the city’s legal department once Prud’ Homme forwards the East St. Paul report.

Nadia, the Grade 10 student from Miles Mac, who was left traumatized and undergoing painful anti-rabies injections, was relieved to learn the dog had been located and doesn’t have rabies.

But understandably, her father Stephen says she still wants it destroyed, so it can’t harm anyone else.

Unlike the Husky-cross, I’m not necessarily out for blood.

But a mere muzzling seems puzzling, given that the owner wasn’t even responsible enough to have her dog on leash.

Sadly, it’s the undisciplined owners of dangerous dogs that are really more at fault than the animals.

I highly doubt that Nadia was the first victim of the Husky.

In fact, a 21-year-old East St. Paul man called last week to report that he had been bitten in Birds Hill Park last year by a similar dog, who also had a female owner.

Actually, he was bitten on the butt.

As was Nadia.

Which, ironically, is where the dog with the Winnipeg safe house address could end biting the city bylaw and those who enforce it.

Right in the ass.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca