Bloodied, bruised and broke: the real cost of dangerous dogs in our communities
When their beloved pets were savaged at the local park, two Brisbane women sought justice. What they encountered was a broken system struggling with an alarming surge in dog attacks.
Coby Beel wasn’t worried at first. The tan and white bulldog she came to know as Ruby was being a pest, but you get that at the dog park. Her diminutive chihuahuas, Pixie and Phoebe, were minding their own business and so was she, stretched out with them on the grass late on a sunny winter’s Monday in Brisbane. The date was August 22, 2022.
Ruby was off-leash, which was a change. Whenever Beel, 33, had seen the burly female bulldog at the Fortitude Valley enclosure she had been on the lead, attended by a woman with distinctive long hair. Phoebe was starting to get agitated. She had been rehomed from a rescue shelter and didn’t like being around larger dogs. Ruby kept coming on, pressing harder and harder against the outstretched palm of Beel’s hand. So she pushed back on the animal’s chest to make it back off. She remembers looking up to catch the eye of the long-haired woman who was standing about six metres away, watching them impassively.
People can be funny about their dogs being handled, and the last thing she wanted was a scene: you’re always running into the same faces at the dog park. “Careful, she might get a bit scared if you get too close,” Beel said, mostly for the other woman’s benefit. Still no response. Beel’s attention was on Phoebe, seated on her lap, but by now an anxious Pixie was quivering at her feet.
Everything happened so quickly it’s hard to get the sequence right. Ruby slipped behind her back and the next thing Beel knew Pixie was shrieking in a way she had never heard before, “just this horrible, high-pitched scream”, she recalls. The bulldog had clamped its jaws around the 3kg chihuahua’s right hind leg and was shaking her like a rag doll. Beel dug her fingers into Ruby’s neck folds and tried to pull the snarling dog away. Another chihuahua owner, Hani, ran over and together they prised Pixie free. Beel maintained her grip on Ruby, terrified to let go. “Can you come hold your dog, please,” she said to the long-haired woman, who at last intervened, according to Beel. She sat down nonchalantly beside Ruby, seemingly without a care in the world, not making eye contact or saying anything Beel would remember. “She was so distant I thought the dog might not be hers,” she says.
Pixie’s heart-rending wails had subsided to a low whimper, and Beel felt physically sick when she saw the gaping puncture wound. Her only thought was to get the dog to an emergency vet. As she walked away from the park with Hani, who had stayed on to help, the long-haired woman called out: “Hey, you forgot your sunnies,” brandishing Beel’s discarded glasses.
Lost for words, she ignored her. Beel was shaking so badly she fumbled with her phone to open the Uber app. It took another age for the car to make it through the peak-hour traffic. Across town, staff at the Greencross animal hospital told her the best they could do was dress the injury and dose Pixie with antibiotics; scans to determine the extent of the underlying tissue damage and whether surgery was needed would have to wait for the swelling to ease. Until then, the wound had to stay open.
At home, Pixie was off her food, out of sorts. The ugly bite seeped blood. Beel made four trips to the vet over the next week, worried about internal bleeding and infection. But eventually, Pixie turned the corner – at a cost of nearly $1800 in medical bills, not to mention the time off Beel had taken from her job as a property manager. She was determined to track down the long-haired woman. She put up posters in the dog park appealing for information that would identify her, and lodged a formal complaint to Brisbane City Council. Yet without a name for the other dog owner, she was told little could be done.
She decided to move on. Until, that is, she was scrolling through the Facebook page of a local dog lovers’ group and read with a jolt the post by Ellen Graham.
It had to be the same dog, and the same long-haired woman, Beel thought. On Saturday, September 23, 2023, Graham’s three-year-old miniature poodle, Penny, was mauled by a tan and white bulldog at the Newstead dog park, an easy walk from where Pixie had been attacked. The woman wasn’t even present this time; she had been seen heading to a nearby public toilet block when an off-leash Ruby went to town on Penny.
“It’s all such a blur,” Graham remembers. “She’s bleeding and I’m bleeding because I’ve somehow got my arm in between the dog’s jaws and Penny’s leg. I ended up with these two puncture wounds on either side of my wrist where I got bitten. The woman came running back in but I’m not sure what she said or did. I was entirely focused on Penny … she’s stressed to the max, crying, there’s blood everywhere.”
Beel had always thought the long-haired woman must live in the area; the Fortitude Valley dog park where Pixie was injured is out of the way, used mostly by locals. You’re always bumping into people you know or recognise in this fashionable reach of the inner city, rolling down to Brisbane River through apartment-choked Newstead, Teneriffe and New Farm. Every now and then she would catch sight of the long-haired woman walking the bulldog.
One day, towards the end of 2022, Beel had actually come face-to-face with them at a pedestrian crossing on Brunswick Street, the busy main drag. She asked her partner, Alex, to snap a photo. They were out with Pixie (who had since recovered) and Phoebe, and Beel hurried to scoop the dogs into her arms. “I had no intention of confronting her in the middle of the road, especially given she had Ruby with her and I had both my dogs,” she says.
But she couldn’t let it lie when she learned that someone else’s pet had been injured, too. After reading Graham’s post the night after Penny was mauled, Beel was struck by the similarities and messaged her with the photo. “I recognised the woman’s hair straight away and her build was the same,” says 35-year-old Graham. “And the thing I had noticed about the dog was that it had massive teats, like it was an ex-breeding dog. I got straight back to Coby and said that’s them, 100 per cent.”
The situation with Penny was touch and go. The ebony poodle had been taken straight into surgery where internal stitches were applied to her torn thigh; again, the wound’s raw exterior was left open until the healing process could advance. The vet was worried about the poodle’s low white blood cell count, indicative of infection. Five days in the ICU and further surgeries ensued, each one upping the bill. In the end, Graham’s out-of-pocket expenses came to $7873. She kept careful count in order to recoup her costs if the long-haired woman could be identified.
A fired-up Beel redoubled her efforts. She plastered the neighbourhood with new posters detailing both attacks alongside the photo Alex had taken. Within days, she received their first break: Lisa, the owner of a dog rescue service, phoned to say that the female bulldog was one of her foster placements. The dog was known to be aggressive and the foster carer had been told explicitly that Ruby – the first time Beel heard the name – was not to be around other dogs, especially in a dog park, Lisa insisted. She pointedly told Beel that Ruby was a “one-dog dog”.
Beel pressed for more information. Who was the long-haired woman? Lisa wouldn’t say. Why protect her when she had clearly done the wrong thing? All she and Graham wanted was a name and address so they could get the ball rolling on restitution. Lisa relented, giving Beel a first name. (We’ll call her Rachel, although that’s a pseudonym.) Ever-punctilious, Beel had her spell it. But Lisa would have to seek legal advice before giving them the information they wanted. Lisa did not respond to calls and texts from The Weekend Australian Magazine.
Beel went back to Brisbane City Council, asking that her complaint into Pixie’s 2022 attack be reactivated. Alas, a 12-month time limit on the claim had kicked in. She provided contacts for Lisa, as well as details of Rachel’s partial identification and what Ruby had done 13 months later to Graham and her dog. Separately, Graham lodged a complaint to the council over that attack. Lisa went on to advise the council that Ruby had been taken back from Rachel by the rescue service and destroyed on September 29 last year, five days after Penny the poodle was mauled. Case closed, Beel was informed by a council officer.
If she and Graham wanted Rachel’s full name and address, they would have to lodge a Right to Information request. Beel paid the $55 fee and submitted the paperwork.
By then, Rachel had been slapped with an infringement notice over Graham’s complaint so Brisbane City Council was fully aware of who she was and where she lived. “We weren’t going away … Ellen and I had paid our [dog] registration fees to the council and we both believed we had a right to know who [she] was when this information was clearly available,” Beel says.
Asked why the details couldn’t be released to the aggrieved women, a spokesperson for the council says it was because the third party to the Right to Information application – Rachel – had exercised her right to object under Queensland law. “The matter was required to undergo further review, conducted by City Legal,” a spokesperson for the council says. “City Legal then released these details to Ms Beel on the basis of the administration of justice.”
Which brings us up to date. Almost. On February 27, Beel was finally furnished with a full name and address after Rachel failed to seek an external review of City Legal’s decision to grant the Right to Information request. The thing was, Beel already knew most of it: Rachel’s lawyers had been in touch with a letter of demand, outing their client in the process. They were threatening Beel with a defamation suit if she didn’t back off.
On legal advice, we are unable to name or otherwise identify her; we even had to pixelate Ruby’s facial features. But that’s beside the point: shaming her is not what this article is about. There’s a bigger story here, and it goes to the attachment all three women have to their pets and the steely determination of Beel and Graham to pursue what they see as justice for the wrong done to them. Both women are unabashed in referring to the dogs as their children. “I don’t like the term ‘owner’,” says Graham, speaking for the growing number of Australians who lavish love and cash on a furry, feathered or scaly companion, creating a growth industry worth an estimated $33 billion annually. “It doesn’t capture how I feel about Penny at all … she’s like my little child, my whole world.”
A fitness instructor and gym manager, trim and quietly-spoken, Graham says she can’t have children, unlike Beel, who doesn’t want a child at this point in her life and is unsure that she ever will. They both live in apartments near Rachel’s unit in a converted commercial building. She, too, has a degree and a good job in the Brisbane CBD.
You will see young and youngish professionals like them walking immaculately clipped dogs before and after work every day in the inner environs of any Australian city. Beel was in primary school when then prime minister Paul Keating famously remarked in 1996 that “two blokes and a cocker spaniel do not make a family”. When I mention this she asks, blank-faced: “Paul who?” The point being that Australia is a very different place to what it was only a generation ago.
These days, family can mean different things to all kinds of different people. A survey last year by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found last year that fully half of the 6000 participants considered their pets to be kin. Further, women were less likely than men to rate blood and genetic ties as important determinants of what constitutes a family. “The nature of family, who comprises a family and how family is created, is undergoing quite a significant change,” says Liz Allen, a demographer with the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research and Methods.
“Over the last 20 years we’ve seen a shift away from biological family to a family that we create, based on the people or the animals we want to be around. At the same time, there has also been a change in the average total fertility rate for women and attitudes to parenthood; many more people are choosing to have children later or to be child-free. Now, there’ll be some who say that the traditional concept of family is being eroded. In actual fact it’s the opposite: the nature of family is broadening and becoming more inclusive as we recognise a greater diversity in what it means to be a family.”
Beel makes no apology for taking her chihuahuas out in a $500 designer dog pram, cheerfully admitting that she’s “crazy” about them. If people scoff, that’s OK, because she doesn’t feel the need to explain herself. “I don’t bother talking to people who don’t like dogs,” she says. “I find we usually don’t have anything in common. I know some of them would see me with Pixie and Phoebe in the pram and they’d probably think, ‘There goes that crazy dog lady’ or something like that … and you know what, that’s fine. I love my dogs.”
Graham says Penny the miniature poodle was her entré to a network of new friends centred on the dog park – a caring community that rallied around her after the attack, providing emotional support and financial help. When she couldn’t pay the vet fees, a GoFundMe drive cleared half the outstanding debt, deeply touching her. Graham’s parents chipped in the rest. She says: “I would never have been able to make those connections by myself. We all went out for drinks last Christmas and we look after each other’s dogs when we’re away. I’m happy to stay in the suburb on the weekend knowing people are around and … we can go for a walk or to the dog park and see them. It’s comforting.”
There’s no doubt Rachel cared deeply about Ruby. In their letter of demand to Beel, her lawyers said the August 2022 attack on Pixie had come as a shock, leaving her upset and “somewhat distraught” by the bulldog’s behaviour. She had not seen Ruby do anything like that before. “We are instructed that you left the dog park before our client had the opportunity to discuss this matter with you,” they wrote. “At the time of the incident, our client therefore had no knowledge of Pixie’s injuries, nor did she have any contact details for you. In the time since the incident, Ruby has been euthanised.”
Beel was offered a $500 settlement, in return for signing a deed releasing Rachel from any claims arising from the dog attack. Otherwise, Rachel reserved her right to take further legal action, including for alleged untrue and defamatory allegations that she was the owner of a dangerous dog and “responsible for dog attacks”. The lawyers said Rachel had been subjected to “continued harassment for a matter that was not her fault”, and lived “in fear of public retribution”, scared to leave home. Without admitting liability, she was “distressed to hear of Pixie’s injuries”, they wrote.
Beel turned them down flat, describing the offer as offensive when conveyed alongside “threats, inconsistencies, [and] distancing of responsibility”. Addressing Rachel directly by return email, she wrote: “You need to step up and own up. Stop hiding behind baseless claims about intimidation, defamation and harassment. Stop pointing the finger at the victims.
“You need to reimburse my vet bills … it is not right that I have been left almost $1800 out of pocket. Now is as good a time as any to do the right thing.”
Graham wonders how Rachel could possibly justify taking Ruby to the dog park where Penny was set upon, knowing full well what had transpired in August 2022. “It shouldn’t have happened the first time but for it to happen again ... is simply inexcusable,” she says. “Like, how could she have taken that dog back into a dog park after being told it was aggressive and having it all play out when Pixie was attacked?”
It’s a good question – one of many we putto Rachel via her lawyers after she failed to respond to repeated requests to be interviewed. She did not answer them. Beel is adamant that she won’t settle for anything less than full restitution – and a “genuine” apology. “The most important thing to be able to move forwards is for [Rachel] to understand why her actions have caused Ellen and myself so much devastation,” she says. “If she doesn’t understand that, the cycle continues with the next dangerous weapon she puts in her hands.”
Graham, meanwhile, has issued her own letter of demand to Rachel to recover her veterinary costs and the medical expenses relating to her hand injury. She warned Rachel: “Your inability to control your pet as you were outside the dog park at the time of the attack reflects gross negligence on your part, and you will be held fully accountable … this demand for compensation is not made lightly, but rather out of necessity to cover the costs associated with the damages caused by your dog.”
Lisa from the dog rescue service recently reached out to the women, advising that they might be covered by her business liability insurance. They’re now in discussions with the insurer. “I’m at the point now where … all of this is beyond a joke,” Graham says.
Her frustration with having to fight tooth and nail for every small gain is echoed by Beel, and lamentably common. Go into any online community group in the country and angry small dog owners will be venting about unprovoked attacks by larger animals that, at best, saddle them with a hefty vet bill. All too often the beloved pet does not survive.
In Brisbane alone, 1455 dog attacks were reported to the council last year, involving mostly canine-on-animal incidents. Nationally, about 2000 people are hospitalised annually for dog bite or related injuries. Upgraded penalties in Queensland provide for fines of up to $108,000 or three years’ jail for the owner of a dog that kills or seriously injures a person. In NSW, the maximum sentence relating to a fatal dog attack is 10 years’ jail.
The experience of Beel and Graham highlights, however, the yawning gaps in the system when it comes to dog-on-dog episodes. Solicitor Carla Melbourne, from personal injury specialists Shine Lawyers, says the deck is stacked against claimants, especially in Queensland. There, the outdated Common Law notion holds sway that dogs are presumed to be tame and domestic. In most other jurisdictions, the person in control of an aggressive dog is strictly liable for any injury it causes; but north of the Tweed, the onus is effectively reversed. To succeed with a damages claim, you have to prove that the owner or responsible party either knew or should have known of the animal’s propensity to attack. “The only way that you’re essentially able to recover damages in Queensland is to prove that the person who had control of the dog was negligent,” Melbourne says.
So here we are outside the Newstead dog park, back where it all started for them. Beel won’t take her chihuahuas inside – or to any dog park for that matter, unless it is deserted. Penny is her lively self, resplendent in the top-knot that Graham fashioned.
Ironically, this is the first time the women have met in person. “It’s weird,” Beel says. “We’ve talked so much online and on the phone and gone through so much together, I feel like we’ve known each other for years.” Her partner Alex is on hand to help with the dogs as we chat. Pixie has just undergone surgery to her leg for a problem unrelated to the attack; she’s propped up in the pram, bandaged from thigh to paw.
It’s hard not to smile at the antics of the dogs cavorting in the fenced enclosure behind them. The sad thing, Beel says, is that she will never trust in their safety like she did before Pixie was injured. She carries dog mace and knows exactly what to do if they’re menaced again. “You lift up the attacking dog by the hind legs and walk them backwards. It’s the only way to make them let go,” she explains.
Graham’s advice to anyone who finds themself in the traumatic situation she and Beel confronted is to not let the responsible party walk away. Get their name at the scene if you can. Pursue them for compensation. Be patient and persistent, no matter what obstacles crop up.
Yes, Beel says, nodding in agreement, that’s the lesson all right. “At the end of the day, there are not harsh enough penalties for irresponsible pet owners to make them think twice before making stupid and dangerous decisions,” she says. “What [Rachel] did, in my opinion, is no different to taking a knife into a busy playground and throwing it up in the air. It might not hit anyone, but when it does, it unleashes a whole world of pain and terror on the victim and bystanders.”
And, who knows, you might find there is justice to be had after all. b
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