Reviewing the dog news in New Zealand with editors comments. Someone needs to keep reviewing how our dogs are doing in society.
Nicky Watson's making headlines again - she's in mourning once more after losing another dog.Watson, whose chihuahua Cricket was found dead on a beach last year - a story which created a mini media storm - has suffered more heartache with the death yesterday of Cricket's replacement, eight-week-old chihuahua Lopez.
Watson was presented with the puppy by friend and fellow dog lover Gilda Kirkpatrick on Wednesday.
A gang-enforced code of silence is protecting an American mastiff dog that savaged two young girls last weekend.
"Don't f... with the mighty Mongrel Mob" was the response to a man who had complained to the owners of the dog, while the father of the two girls bitten on Sunday was not laying a complaint after receiving a threat from "some very nasty people".
Christchurch City Council dog control officers were "frustrated" no-one would put their name to a complaint that would get the dog off the streets once and for all.
The dog, currently in the custody of council dog control officers, was thought to be part of a group of dogs that had menaced a street in Dallington for several months.
However, locals were too frightened to speak out against the owners, who were known to have gang connections.
The dogs, two white American mastiffs and another brown dog, were moved to Redwood, about a week ago after Housing New Zealand ordered the dogs out.
There, one of the mastiffs attacked six- year-old Georgia Thomas and her sister, Molly, eight, on Sunday. The girls were being looked after by a girl who lived at the house where the dogs were staying.
MORE>>Not registering your dog in Palmerston North is about to get expensive.
About 1200 dogs - some 16 percent of the city's known dog population - aren't registered and the city council is about to hit owners with letters asking them to pay up or face a $450 bill for outstanding fees and fines.
Anyone who didn't pay that bill could expect followup through the court system, which would incur still more fees.
Defaulting owners would be told they now owed the council a 50 percent penalty on the fee they owed. (A general registration costs $97. Registering a desexed animal costs $75; preferred owners who pay their bills on time are charged $58, which drops to $49 for desexed dogs.)
If this wasn't paid within a fortnight, a $300 fine would be added.
So how will they pay? I guess the dog disappears?
I'm just wondering if having a fee is a good idea. If there were NO FEES to register a dog, you'd get more compliance, and the city would save them going and collecting the fees...
I just don't understand how councils can jack up the price beyond inflation !
"We've run out of patience," Mr Jameson said.
He estimated that about half the city's 1200 unregistered dogs might now not be in the city. Dogs died, people sold or gave them away, or they shifted outside the city council's area.
Collecting $450 fines for half the 1600 unregistered dogs would bring in $270,000. This money, like all fines, would go towards administration costs, offsetting the amount of rates money that has to be collected.
OTHER articles
A pitbull attack on horses and riders returning from a Muriwai Beach guided trek is one of the worst Rodney animal control officers say they have encountered.
They describe the unprovoked attack on four of eight horses in the group as particularly vicious.
The January 5 incident has left the district’s horse-riding fraternity stunned and angry at what they see as a lack of official support in controlling dogs and motorcyclists on the popular west coast beach.
"It was horrific," says Kim Bell, who has been leading beach treks more than 15 years.
"I have been riding out here for 20 years and never had anything happen like that.
The woman being hunted by the SPCA over starved puppy Eve says she's no mongrel.
Paulette Taki's name was publicly released by the animal welfare group earlier last week because it believed she had information about one of New Zealand's worst-ever cases of animal neglect.
The 11-month-old Ridgeback cross was just a day from death when SPCA officers who named her Eve rescued her on Christmas Eve from under Taki's state house in the Auckland suburb of Glen Innes.
(...)
But when Sunday News tracked Taki down to a relative's home in Katikati, north of Tauranga, on Thursday, she denied responsibility for the pup's poor condition saying she had left it in a relative's care while she was away visiting a terminally-ill aunt.
"I told (a relative) to look after my dog, I gave (her) the dog rolls and that because I had to come down here," Taki said.
"I'm not taking the blame, hell no."
This is a sad case. She is legally responsible, but quite frankly, didn't she ring to find out how her dog was doing?? She obviously didn't pick the right relative to look after the dog.
A beautiful black puppy that bought light into Sir Edmund Hillary's last days will be on hand to watch Tuesday's funeral procession.
She is eight-month-old Yanche, named by Sir Ed.
She will later be trained as a guide dog by the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind.
Yanche, pronounced yun-gee, is a Sherpa name.
The owner of a staffordshire cross dog which clamped its jaws onto the face of a girl playing at Christchurch's Jellie Park has been ordered to pay $3500 to her family for emotional harm.
"One of the major points of the sentencing will be to help the little girl who is the innocent victim in all of this," said Simon Shamy, counsel for Robert John Lees, who lives in a Greers Road house near the park.
Judge Raoul Neave also fined Lees $250 but said most of the penalty would go to the family "to restore as best we can, in the limited way that money would enable us to do".
A Napier man swung a puppy through the air on a chain and bashed it with a bicycle seat as horrified children looked on, Napier District Court has been told.
The details of the Boxing Day abuse on the busy Gloucester St, through Greenmeadows and Taradale, emerged when Edward James Hazel, 36, appeared in court yesterday.
He pleaded guilty to one charge of ill-treating the puppy, two of threatening to injure women who saw the incident, and one charge of disorderly behaviour.
caution about reading more as it reads really awful.
So, why isn't this guy named?
Almost all of the 12 animals that have featured in the Herald's SPCA "Adopt Me" summer series have found homes - a result that has delighted the organisation.
From Portia, the sweet, short-hair tabby, to Prudence, the high-energy English pointer, Kiwis have opened their hearts and homes to animals desperately in need of a loving home. MORE>>
Abandoned dog Eve, the victim of what the SPCA describes as one of the worst ever cases of neglect, is now extremely popular with offers for adoption from as far away as Canada.
Eve, named because she was found by the SPCA on Christmas Eve, was found locked under a state house in Glenn Innes, Auckland, surviving on insects and her own waste.
The 11-month-old ridgeback cross weighed just 10kg when she was found, every bone was visible and she could barely stand. MORE>>
A man whose left ear was bitten off by a police dog is to have it reconstructed, at the expense of ACC.
The surgery, a rare and complex series of operations, will probably cost about $20,000.
Casey Voges, 29, conceded in a Sunday newspaper that it was probably unfair that the taxpayer would be paying for his surgery but he believed the dog attack was an assault and warranted compensation.
Voges is in Auckland Central Remand Prison facing 10 charges of burglary, one of theft and another of unlawful access to an enclosed yard.
The newspaper said Voges had spent 12 years of his life behind bars in Australia and New Zealand for burglary and drug use but now he says he wants to turn around his life.
And to help he needs the new ear -- his was bitten off by a police dog during an arrest in February 2005. MORE>>
Monday's article Row over jail inmate's cosmetic surgery
....National Party ACC spokeswoman Pansy Wong said taxpayers would find it very difficult to digest that their hard-earned money was going to cosmetically enhance a criminal's looks.
"He claims he is a victim and that victims have a right to be compensated, but I am certain society's true victims will find this claim repugnant......
What do you think?
My opinion is that if a police dog bites someone, he's not well trained. Police dogs should be elite dogs, but apparently they aren't. There's an article in my blog that has a complaint against the police dog handlers. I never did learn the outcome of that.
Yes, the guy was a burglar (I was burglarized more times in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world, so I know how it feels), but I also can see the other side, and that is... the guy had a dog attack him ! When a dog attacks a person, that dog is usually put down.
Now the police are going to say that they should have tasers... but as we know from the Canadian experience, it does more harm because cops then to use them without looking for another means first. But that's another issue...
A dog stranded on a mountain ledge since New Year's Day faces at least one more night alone in the wilderness.
Bad weather is blocking attempts to rescue it.
Diff, a 65kg bull mastiff, has been stuck on Mt Maroon, near the town of Rathdowney in southeast Queensland, after slipping down the cliff during a bushwalk with two men, aged 24 and 30.
The men set off with Diff shortly before midnight on New Year's Eve, planning to watch the year's first sunrise.
Authorities began searching for the men after they did not return on Tuesday, and they were found on Wednesday afternoon.
(...) An SPCA inspector yesterday used a television news helicopter in another effort to save Diff.But the rescue attempt was abandoned because of heavy rain and strong winds.SPCA spokesman Michael Beatty said another attempt was unlikely before tomorrow morning, when the weather was expected to improve.
(...)Two mountaineers involved in the search for Diff's owners yesterday tried to drop off food for the dog, but could not find him.
Isn't this great.. I mean, all this effort to bring the dog down to safety. It's a great dog story...
Mr Beatty said a dog could survive for up to two weeks without food."The problem would be dehydration, but obviously there's plenty of water around."
While Diff has been blamed for landing his owners in trouble in the first place, the unlucky dog was also credited with getting them out of trouble.
It's a doggy dog world...
It was his loud barking that drew rescuers to their location.
Mt Maroon is part of the Mt Barney National Park.Dogs are prohibited in national parks - an issue likely to be raised with Diff's owners once he has been rescued.
Opps! there goes a $500 fine!
- AAP
