HRM Solicitor Katherine Salsman Said No to Adoption & All Alternatives to Killing Brindi: 2010 Memo

Another dismal end of year, and the most dismal end.
It's time to get things straightened out once and for all. This is not your average dog case. From the outside, it's not always clear. I forget this often because I am in the thick of this struggle. What gets said and proven in court isn't reported. In between, the press passes on whatever the city says. The public fills in the blanks, based on general knowledge of other cases. So I am going to put this out as clearly as I can:

• I did not prolong Brindi's time in the pound.
• I am not a dog owner who doesn't know anything about dogs and doesn't train their dog.
• I did not fail to take incidents seriously.
• I did not ignore a muzzle order on Brindi twice, or at all.
• My memo to HRM from 2010 is the first of many documents dealing with adoption. In that memo I listed five offers I made in person to the HRM lawyer. I offered to plead guilty and pay fines if they would let Brindi go on any one of those offers. This would have avoided a costly trial and gotten Brindi out of the pound right away.

I asked HRM to choose one of these measures and I would plead guilty and pay fines: 

1. Release Brindi to me pending trial, and if HRM wanted, I would put up a bond as high as $10,000, or, 

2. Let Brindi go to a foster home pending the outcome of the trial, or, 

3. Drop the prosecution's request to the judge to order Brindi to be killed, or, 

4. Release Brindi to me and I would take her out of the country and go back to the States.  

5. Let Brindi go to another owner, either here or anywhere else, i.e., ADOPTION!

Thoughts on Dangerous Dogs & Seizure Warrants in Halifax

I believe in good animal control and good dog by-laws because public safety is important. I don't happen to believe in putting a healthy dog down.

Dogs just don't rate high enough as a threats to human life to merit killing them if they step out of line. Dogs don't even show up on the top 50 causes of accidental death and injury. So to me, killing a healthy dog because it inflicts harm, or is said to be likely to inflict harm, is unacceptably disproportionate. It's also immoral, when you consider that Canada no longer kill humans who kill other humans.

When balanced against the enormous value of the human-canine bond that predates modern society, killing healthy dogs seems very immoral. People have kept dogs for some 30,000 years - longer than there were cities, laws, and the family as we know it - and the human-canine bond is likely to endure longer than those institutions. True, not everybody likes dogs, but dogs serve everybody - in security, in special needs cases, at hospitals, and, lord knows, in research! So it's only right that our laws reflect how important dogs are to us.

As a result, any city insisting it has a right to destroy lawfully owned dogs must insure that those laws are fair and and effective. Above all, they must avoid infringing rights and harming dogs needlessly. And the most important part of dog by-laws is the definition of dangerous at their core. Without a reasonable, science-based definition of "dangerous", no dog laws can be fair or effective. When we look at how Halifax deals with "dangerous", however, things don't look so good.

Under Halifax local law,  deeming a dog dangerous doesn't require Halifax to seize and kill the dog in question, regardless of circumstance. The law doesn't stipulate when Halifax should kill a dog, such as following a serious incident. It leaves all of this up to the animal control officer and the prosecutor.