The issue of yard dogs is not part of the motion that will be before you tonight, but it is an issue that I hope you will consider addressing, either added to this motion, or in the near future.

This is how Animal Advocates defines a yard dog:

A yard dog is a dog that is consistently kept outside the primary building. Many yard dogs live their whole lives, night and day, summer and winter, loose in a residential or a business yard, in a dirty pen, on a chain, in a garage, caged behind a building, boarded up under a porch or a deck, on a balcony, and some are even kept in sheds.

The “Prohibition of Cruelty” sections 600.1 to 601.4 in your existing animal control bylaw were adopted as a result of an Animal Advocates “Humane Treatment of Dogs” campaign in the 1990’s which resulted in those sections being adopted in eleven Lower Mainland municipalities and in other municipalities in BC. For that we are grateful to you.

But the sad fact is that these bylaws don’t seem to have been used in New Westminster to relieve the suffering of yard dogs, at least to the best of our knowledge.

AAS has received reports of suffering dogs in New Westminster over the years, and though many of them were reported to your Animal Control and to the SPCA, nothing improved for the dogs.

Granted, section 600.3, which is “The opportunity for daily exercise sufficient to maintain good health, including the opportunity to be unfettered from a fixed area for a reasonable length of time each day…”, the section that attempts to prevent a life on a chain or in some other inhumane way, is difficult to enforce.

Burnaby had also adopted Animal Advocates’ “Humane Treatment of Dogs” sections and had also found that they didn’t result in any relief of yard dogs’ suffering. To address that, in 2006 the City of Burnaby added Anti-Tethering sections to its animal control bylaws.

Section 15A (8) (a) and (b) of the Burnaby bylaw require that: No person shall: “keep a dog tethered while unattended for more than one hour in any day”; or: “keep a dog tethered for more than one hour in any day, whether attended or not, on property used for any purpose other than residential use.’

Animal Advocates addressed Burnaby Council on the short-comings of this bylaw; specifically that there was no definition of “attended”. A chained dog could be “attended” if there was some person somewhere on the property thereby allowing the dog on the property to be chained 24 hours a day.

We also pointed out that in our long experience, when this type of dog owner is told that they cannot tether a dog, they make the dog’s life even worse by putting the dog into a pen or a garage or a shed where it can’t be so easily seen and reported, but where it can’t see anything either. This is much more cruel than being tethered. In fact, as Burnaby council was considering its anti-tethering bylaw, Animal Advocates received a report of an outside tethered dog that was then tethered inside a garage after it had been reported to Burnaby animal control – the SPCA. Our warnings were proven true even as the bylaw was being considered.

Attached are some photos of yard dogs and Animal Advocates’ proposal for a comprehensive yard dog bylaw. This is not the time or place to discuss this issue further, but Animal Advocates will be asking you to address the issue of yard dogs in New Westminster and we hope to be able to work with you on a yard dog bylaw that does not worsen dogs’ lives; one that addresses all the issues, not just tethering.