----- Original Message -----
From: Animal Advocates
To: mayor@city.iqaluit.nu.ca
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 9:32 AM
Subject: To Mayor Elisapee Sheutiapik and Council

Dear Mayor Elisapee Sheutiapik, Deputy Mayor Allan Hayward, Councillor Glen Williams, Councillor Jimmy Kilabuk, Councillor Jim Little, Councillor Simon Nattaq, Councillor Claude Martel and Councillor David Alexander,

I read the article (below) and would like to offer the benefit of our experience with chained dogs, although I am sure you already know that chaining dogs is one of the oldest methods of making dogs dangerously aggressive. To chain any animal, human or otherwise. Dogs are the most social animals on earth, more so than humans, and to chain them, alone and lonely is also cruelty.

Please read what many experts have to say on this subject:

http://www.animaladvocates.com/yard-dogs/research-behavioural.php

http://www.animaladvocates.com/yard-dogs/research-public-safety.php

"The general consensus is that chaining out a dog for long periods makes it aggressive. There are even tracts which were found on the ruins of Pompeii suggesting that the way to make you guard dog vicious is to tether him on a short chain…Anecdotal evidence (from my own 11 years of teaching dog obedience classes) says that dogs which have been tied out are either vicious, fearful and hand-shy or both.

Stanley Coren, Ph.D. E-mail communication to Animal Advocates Society of BC, 2/2/01."

As long as dogs are made dangerous by chaining, some will escape, in spite of council's suggestion that the dogs need to be chained more securely, and some will attack. Most of the victims will be children as all the research shows, and there will be deaths in Iqualuit, if there hasn't already been.

Councils have a mandate to protect citizens from dangerous dogs, but this will never be achieved by chaining; the only way to assure that dogs are not dangerous is to ban keeping them in isolation, outside, on chains, or in pens, and to require training and tests for all dogs large enough to inflict serious damage.

Yours very truly,

Judith Stone
Animal Advocates Society of BC