CANADA -- It’s one thing to pass the buck.
But passing off a vicious 40-kg Rottweiler on an unsuspecting city like Calgary, without so much as a courtesy phone call?
Kamloops, B.C., thank you for being a bunch of jerks.
That’s, of course, if Kamloops city officials are really guilty of the morally-bent bylaw enforcement being reported by multiple B.C. news sources, following last week’s savage attack on a local senior.
It took 98 stitches to close the bites on Mary Gural’s arm after the 84-year-old grandma found out the hard way what happens when a dangerous dog is allowed to remain free.
Gural was walking past the problem Rottweiler with her husband after the female dog was left loosely tied outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Kamloops, 600 km west of Calgary.
“I really didn’t like the looks of the dog — you know how people have that instinct? So I tried to walk around,” Gural told the Sun.
“But everything happened so fast.”
RCMP say the dog, a female named Midnight, was being watched by the 27-year-old friend of the dog’s owner, who left it outside the restaurant.
The problem is, the Rottweiler — since euthanized — shouldn’t have been unsupervised in public, and certainly not without the muzzle mandated under the Kamloops bylaw for dogs deemed dangerous to humans.
Midnight, it transpired, had attacked before.
On June 1, the Rottweiler attacked postal carrier Ken Leblanc at its owner’s home, leaving him with deep puncture wounds all over his arm.
Midnight was ruled a dangerous dog which, under Kamloops law, is normally a pretty strict edict.
It means the owner has to buy a $200 licence, extra house insurance in case it chomps again, and a muzzle for when the dog is out in public — which of course means full supervision on a leash.
But the real crux in this case was the owner’s obligation to build a pen in his yard to cage the dog — something he wasn’t allowed to do at his rental property.
Instead, Kamloops decided to let the owner of this savage beast off the hook, because he promised to make the headache of a dog go away completely — to Calgary, that is, at another property he claimed to own.
Thus, no cage, no muzzle and apparently no follow-up supervision to ensure the toothy Rottweiler had really departed Kamloops.
Adding to this sloppy enforcement was a total lack of concern for the people living just over the mountains in Alberta, who might like to know about the dangerous dog headed their way.
In Calgary, Animal and Bylaw Services officials confirm there was no contact at all from the City of Kamloops regarding the incoming dog, or its tendency to bite people.
Of course, there is no legal obligation for Kamloops to make such a call — it would strictly be a professional courtesy, based on human decency and concern that someone else might be hurt.
Why Calgary wasn’t warned isn’t clear, with bylaw officials in Kamloops failing to return repeated calls, and a message to the Kamloops mayor going unanswered.
Maybe they forgot? Or maybe they didn’t care, with the dog out of sight and out of mind.
Either way, it was a jerk move.
Ultimately, Kamloops’ failure to follow up on the dangerous Rottweiler meant an 84-year-old woman in their own city ended up with a mangled limb.
It could easily have been a Calgarian, and Gural is still counting her blessings the dog got her arm, rather than her throat or face.
“It should have been put down the first time it attacked someone,” said Gural, who is waiting to find out if she’ll need surgery for the bites.
She says the attack was so sudden, there was no chance to avoid the snapping fangs.
“Everything happened so fast — it wasn’t tied up very well, and it took one leap, and that was it.”
(Calgary Sun - Sept 11, 2012)
