Pets can be a person’s best friend, but if they get out of line and are disturbing or hurting people or other animals, there are bylaws in place that are supposed to ensure that the owners are held to account.
If a complaint is made about someone’s furry friend, bylaw officers are tasked with investigating the incident and trying to figure out who is at fault. But a loophole in the process is allowing some people off the hook when they should be at fault for their dog’s actions.
But if people are not cooperating with the investigation, officers have to try and convince the owners to willingly hand over personal information needed to potentially prosecute them.
It is up to officers, like Jason Crossley, the Supervisor of Animal Protection Services at the Regina Humane Society, to try and get them to talk.
“You just have to negotiate,” said Crossley. “But you will get people who are smart, they’ve been around the system, they either will not cooperate or they won’t even open their door. They’ll just disappear and if we don’t get that information there’s nothing we can do.”
Bylaw officers are the lead investigators between the city and the people involved in an animal incident. They provide all the information that a prosecutor might need to hand down punishment to guilty dog owners. But getting the information needed to conclude a case is not always an easy task, according to Crossley.
“The victim is usually willing to cooperate with us because they want some resolution,” said Crossley. “Sometimes you find the dog owners quite resistant providing information to allow us to take further action because they know that they are responsible for what happened.”
When looking into animal complaints on behalf of the city, Crossley goes through more or less the same process in each investigation.
“We go by the information we get, we try and get as much information as we can, we assemble all the files and put it through to a prosecutor,” said Crossley.
Most animal-related bylaw complaints are not serious enough to warrant a criminal charge, with most getting a fine or warning. But officer’s hands are sometimes tied when trying to coax personal information out of people to keep the case moving.
For more serious animal bylaw infractions in Regina, people can be fined up to $25,000. But if the dog owner does not want to risk paying a fine or worse, there are loopholes for them to avoid consequences.
“We have no powers to get the information, we can’t arrest them, we can’t get the police to get the information, basically it becomes a dead end and so we are sort of dependent on people cooperating,” said Crossley.
These dead end cases get the offenders and their pets off the hook and leave victims of dog bites to deal with any injuries unsure whether the animal that bit them was sick or up to date with vaccinations.
“Basically if they’re that bound and determined that they won’t even have anything to do with us, we’re at a dead end. We can’t force anyone. There’s nothing legally we can do to get their information,” said Crossley. “We’re not peace officers, we’re just contracted bylaw enforcement officers.
