Dog's life

>> Canines live for months in tiny spaces only to be returned to cruel owners

by GEORGE MADDUX

At the rare sight of a human, the wide-eyed terrier-bulldog shakes in full-body-wag mode, his round fleshy belly quivering in delight. On his left, a fluffy brown mutt jumps unrelentingly and maniacally upwards to celebrate the occasion. Since last April the duo have been stuck in a tiny, enclosed space with a concrete floor--a malodorous cage no larger than a dozen square feet in the basement of the Jean-Talon SPCA.

Like a dozen others who howl madly and leap at the four-foot-high concrete walls, the pair has been taken from their owner, who could face charges of cruelty and neglect. The canines are kept in the closet-sized enclosures for the duration of a human legal process that can take up to two years.

"The first day here they wait for someone to come and walk them. Nobody comes. And they try to hold it in until they almost explode," says Kate Davey, one of a half-dozen volunteers who comes periodically to walk and tend to the dogs. Recently, an abused Alsatian that once guarded a parking lot died of stress on his first day in confinement, she recounts. The confinement also causes the hounds to develop behavioural problems from which they might never recover, according to Davey.

The nightmare often ends when judges smack bad owners with a token fine and begins anew as the dogs are returned to the same abusive home. But in other cases, abusive owners simply forget about their old dogs. "They get new, younger, cuter dogs. Meanwhile these dogs have been stuck here, ineligible for adoption," says Davey.

The legal system simply doesn't take animal abuse seriously, according to SPCA executive director Pierre Barnoti, whose inspectors seize up to 350 abused animals a year. "The crown will pay us a per diem of around $5 per animal per day but they're so worried about paying the $5 that it becomes extremely difficult for us to convince them that it's a case of cruelty. A year ago in Ste-Hyacinthe we seized 18 dogs abandoned in the forest and the Crown was so worried about paying $90 a day that they issued a warrant to arrest the man just so the police could locate him and return the dogs to him."

The proposed bill C-17 would stiffen potential punishment of abusive owners, increasing the maximum fine for animal abuse from $2,000 to an unlimited amount. It would allow judges to impose a lifetime ban on owning a pet up from the current two years. The maximum prison sentence would go from two to five years. But Barnoti remains skeptical. "In my six years here I've never seen an animal abuser sentenced to prison. I'm very happy they're passing stiffer sentences but what's the point of reinventing the guillotine if we never use the whip?"

Meanwhile the tiny patch of concrete granted each abused dog remains the only solution because allowing a foster family to temporarily house the dog only increases heartbreak. "When a judge orders a dog returned to a cruel owner, the foster family says, 'No way I'm giving back the animal, I love that animal,'" says Bernoti. "In some cases foster families have claimed the animal died or escaped, just so they wouldn't have to give him back."