Secrets, Lies, and Abuse: thoughts from late 2015

I am posting this text from late 2015 now, in light of what Halifax - in the form of Katherine Salsman, Hope Swinimer, and Christine and Derek Graham - did to me and Brindi for over five years, topped by their blatant lies about adoption last week. They have essentially stolen my dog and neglected her health for five years. She looks ragged and worn and yet they told media she's been living in the Graham's home all this time - and allowed to play with other dogs! Clearly untrue, especially since they swore to the court in 2012 that she was kept away from dogs and locked up in the kennel!

For what it's worth this is how I felt a lot of the time, as I struggled to keep going so I could keep Brindi alive:

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Victims of abuse .... often hide their abuse from others.
Abusers often count on this as well. It's an age-old mechanism: the more they intimidate their victims, the less likelihood their misdeeds will be discovered.

I just realized I may be doing this unconsciously to some degree. And I suspect it may be a mistake. Why hide it? Maybe because I don't think of myself as a victim of abuse. It's not like there's support groups out there for victims of municipalities - and admittedly, this goes pretty far beyond bureaucratic bullying.

But maybe also that despite evidence surrounding me, I don't like to think of myself as a victim. Who really does?

Brindi no longer considered dangerous? GIVE HER BACK!

Please pinch me!!! Or don't, just hit me over the head with something, just knock me out forever and ever.

My anger is a mask for deep, deep sorrow and despair. My anger is my shield from the image of my poor, poor beauty.  Grinding and stomping the last bits of my shattered to the ground, it seems like all local media outlets, silent for five years, suddenly jumped aboard the "Let's blame Francesca" wagon.

Yet most of the day, it looked to me as though HRM was done for - the more they tried to show they had really done a great thing for Brindi by locking her up for 7 years and by now adopting her to a "good home" (never to be named or pictured), the worse it looked. For a fraction of a second, I may have even started thinking things just might turn my way. 

After all, the more that HRM talks about adoption, the more it looks totally in the wrong. And I was and am in the right. But. I didn't count on the fairy tale factor. The spin-dry cycle. The great fictional talents of this municipality and its stewards.

HRM is turning the screw yet again, telling a tale of how they have rehabilitated my good dog, and now (just in time for HRM to land a dismissal order using similarly shameless fictions), now, thanks to them, she is "no longer considered dangerous." So there's a whole new script: Brindi, in the wonderful care of HRM, has been transformed - not into a chronically ill senior with a dull coat and glassy eyes, but into a - gosh! - "good dog."

And the CBC headline? "Brindi the dog to be adopted after lengthy court battle." The insinuation? BIZARRELY: that the lengthy court battle part is MY FAULT!!! Nothing at all to do with HRM's seven years of mindless determination to refuse all reasonable alternatives to KILLING MY DOG!

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. 

Halifax you are NOT entitled to adopt Brindi out! She already has a loving home - my home!

 

So tonight CTV Atlantic ran a top story saying "Brindi the dog gets new owner" [Ed. note: The story was taken down a few days later]. That's news to me!

You might expect me to welcome such news, but I could not be more upset. And for a host of reasons.

Sure, I got an email from the HRM prosecutor Katherine Salsman on Monday, saying HRM will "proceed with the adoption". What adoption, I asked? Just days before, and ever since 2010, this woman has had a one-track mind about killing Brindi.*

   
Then I warned her that it was not entitled to do this legally - not now and not for a long time, thanks to the lawsuit that HRM itself forced me to file back in 2008 (more on this below).

But I didn't think CTV would just blindly report this story without checking facts. And, they said they tried to contact me for a comment. Yet I didn't get one call, email, or tweet, nothing. 

FIRST: THIS IS A MASSIVE REVERSAL FOR HRM! 

Did anybody think to ask the responsible parties at city hall why, after SEVEN YEARS of trying to kill her (lawfully or unlawfully), they are suddenly willing to let my beautiful, smart, loving girl live?

Isn't HRM essentially conceding it's been wrong all along??

I think so. So my heart has been broken over and over, I lived through hell for seven years, suffering from trauma after trauma, fear and grief, PTSD, depression, enduring countless losses and hardship, unable to work full time, unable to complete major home renovations, unable to live, essentially - and the same for Brindi, who has been made ill and kept in isolation year after year after year, all for nothing. Of course, for nothing. I already knew this - so did HRM, frankly, because it always knew it had no case for seizing and killing Brindi. 

But no way does HRM now get to do an about-face and talk about adoption as if it was already a done-deal. Not so fast!!! Not until and unless those responsible are held accountable for all the damage done, in addition to wasting taxpayer money on needless and, let's be honest, malicious prosecution.

SECONDLY... Can we believe HRM and its prosecutor, Ms. Salsman? 

How do we know for sure what HRM will really do with Brindi, let alone what it is doing to her now? Not only has HRM been dishonest in the past about Brindi and other dogs; its "staff" have cloaked themselves in excessive secrecy, the kind that shouts "We have something to hide!"

THIRDLY... It's a bit premature for HRM to announce adoption, because of the following.