Do You Feel Lucky?

Pump going again, did two loads of laundry. I owe the flow to a kind man named Sheldon who lives up the road from me and came to fix the second leak, and redo the first. It was a pretty gusty afternoon to be standing on a ladder cutting copper tubing, with the risk of getting drenched when it was time to test the system.

I have an obscene amount of dishes to do now. No rush...

Okay, I've been looking at this deal with my dog from all sorts of angles for almost four months now - the next badiversary is the 24th - and the more I learn, the more I see, the more absolutely incredulous I become. (Hint: see the poll in the left column). Animal control officials from the US and Canada write to me or comment on the petitions expressing their dismay and disapproval for what is going on. When the pros do that, something's got to be off somewhere. And it is not merely the system; that's a fundamental factor, but one of many. Even with the various bureaucratic limitations, there were and still are a number of ways out of it that do not require me to spend practically a year's salary to go to court.

Essentially Brindi is being held without charges. The charges should go to me of course, and I'd have the option to challenge them in court. But they didn't, and I don't. So the result is either sign her over, or take on some sort of court process, and the question becomes, which kind? There are so many ways to shape injunctions, applications, and suits, with a spectrum of risk vs. timing. I'm no lawyer - though at times I may seem as argumentative as one - but from what I gather, it's like this: you cannot appeal an injunction, but you can get one within a matter of days. You might reverse the kill order and even win damages in a lawsuit, and you can appeal the outcome, but takes a year to schedule the first day; an interim application takes a few weeks, and I have no idea actually if it can be appealed; we've filed another kind that takes two months to go before a judge. And we could base them on a number of different factors, from the lack of charge to the by-law itself. How much more confusing can it get? And the way things are going, I'll probably wind up with whichever judge ruled twice against the poor dog that roughed up a greyhound last year. As if he never heard of training, or a fence, or anything.

It pains me deeply that so many dog owners out there in HRM seem to fail to grasp the danger, never mind the injustice. Maybe it's easier to label the owner irresponsible, rather than the authorities, if only to be able to sleep at night. I really don't know. But I doubt my lone struggle will tone down the zeal of animal control. The truth is, an order to destroy can happen to any dog at any time. If nobody from the city deemed it appropriate to apologize to Jean Hanlon for the loss of her family cat, anything is possible, it seems to me. If I happened to own some other dog and not Brindi - and there's lots of big strong dogs out there, bigger than her - could I quietly watch this struggle? It's a troubling thought. Like everybody else, I'm distracted by the animal abuse cases popping up on a regular basis; they deserve all the attention and action they can get. But the threat of a seizure and kill of our own dogs is still there. You don't always get a 14-day grace period, either; it can be as few as three days. I know of no local group actively working to change that.

So, if you have a dog in HRM, I guess what it all comes down to is, are you feeling lucky?
Just how lucky?