All the research, without exception, proves that isolating and confining dogs makes the dogs either depressed or angry or self-directed. And when the dogs get loose they frequently attack something -- out of over-stimulation, or confusion, or fear, or deliberately -- usually a child or an animal. All the research proves this too. It was isolated yard dogs that attacked young Shenica White.

All over BC, from Shaughnessy in Vancouver to the far north, dogs are kept on chains, on ropes, in pens, in garages, in sheds, and boarded up under porches. The root cause of attacks like the one on the Abbotsford child is that every municipality allows dogs to be kept as livestock, but in ways that the law would never permit any other species to be kept: on chains and in tiny pens, and even in garages on chains and in pens.

Would any city permit anyone to keep a goat or a cat that way? It not only permits gross cruelty to the dog, but it absolutely creates public dangers to our children. There is no excuse for everyone involved in this issue not to know that.

Animal Advocates presented all the research to the City of Vancouver six years ago -- before the attack on Shenica White -- yet the City has done nothing to ban yard dogs so that there isn't another child's life ruined, and I have had four different SPCA inspectors tell me that there is nothing wrong with keeping a dog in a garage.

The answer to the danger and the inhumanity is to ban yard dogs.