ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal orders family dog to be put down
A CANBERRA tribunal has “very reluctantly” decided a beloved and loyal family pit bull must be sent to doggie death row.
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A CANBERRA tribunal has “very reluctantly” decided a beloved and loyal family pit bull must be sent to doggie death row.
The ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal on Wednesday decided the “important family pet”, should be destroyed after it bit one of its owner’s friends three times and became aggressive in the pound.
The names of the owner, her family, the biting victim and the dog are all suppressed.
The owner, heartbroken, took her case to the tribunal in the hope it would overturn an earlier decision of the ACT Registrar of Domestic Animals, which had ordered the female pit bull to be destroyed.
The hard-fought hearing saw the owner enlist an animal behaviourist, family members and friends in an attempt to save the dog.
She told the tribunal she at first didn’t want to keep the former guard dog in the weeks after she purchased it.
“(But) the bond between us all got pretty strong, pretty quickly,” she said.
“We love her as much as we love each other.”
The authorities responded with the evidence of a vet and a string of public servants.
The owner said the first time the dog bit her “on again, off again” friend was not an attack, but just the dog “playing”.
She said the victim’s description of the bite as an “attack” was him trying to get back at her.
The dog attacked the friend a second time when he raised his voice at the woman’s kids to go and have a bath.
The bite victim was attacked a third time, in December 2018, when the man was being “verbally abusive” to the woman.
In a later visit to a vet, the woman said her dog "will be fine but can become aggressive towards men”.
The vet, Dr Eamon Ryan, gave evidence the dog posed a danger to the public and to other dogs.
A veteran dog behaviourist, Sean Ehlers, told the tribunal the dog could be trained, muzzled in public and that his concerns about the dog were “the same as for any large dog with children”, but he said training problem dogs was “not an exact science”.
The tribunal said it was a “very difficult decision” whether to order the dog be destroyed or not.
The tribunal said there were “real doubts” about whether the dog could be dealt with other than by putting it down “even if this will be distressing for (the owner) and her children”.