The Editor,
Victoria Times Colonist
letters@times-colonist.com

The woman who rescued the dog from a life in a yard said it best - get a cow if you want to keep an animal outside. Dogs have been bred for companionship for ten thousand years. Dogs are companions, not livestock. They suffer horribly from isolation and they frequently are driven by increasing anger to attack humans when they get loose, most frequently, the child in the family that the dog is so "loved" by.

There is a long and compassionate history of women rescuing yard dogs. AAS has documented this phenomenon going back to the 1920's when Doris Day and her mother removed a chained dog from a neighbour.

It is despicable that law makers are so indifferent to the safety of children and to the cruelty of treating dogs this way that they haven't passed a simple law prohibiting the keeping of unattended dogs in yards. It allows the ruin of trusting, innocent dogs, it puts children at serious risk, and it forces thousands of women a year to do what this woman did - take the law into their own hands, at terrible risk, because the law is doing nothing.

Nor has the BC SPCA ever encouraged lawmakers to adopt humane treatment of dogs laws. No one but people like this brave woman are doing the right thing.

Judy Stone
President, Animal Advocates Society of BC