After more than 500 days in the pound, Auckland Council successfully appealed Zeus' stay of execution and had him put down for biting somebody
A Waiheke woman is questioning the one-size-fits-all nature of the Dog Control Act, after her dog spent 509 days waiting injured in the pound for the courts to decide his fate, only to be put down in August.
In a two-year-long back and forth through the legal system, Auckland Council ultimately spent almost $17,000 in expenses looking after a dog it intended to have put down.
Ten-year old Zeus initially escaped his fate after biting a man’s hand at a Waiheke Island freight business, with Judge Maria Pecotic decreeing exceptional circumstances that needn’t see him destroyed.
However, after an appeal was launched by Auckland Council, headed by in-house legal counsel David Collins, Zeus’ stay of execution was overturned and the dog was killed - more than two years after the bite that sealed his doom.
They were two tough years for Zeus, who spent most of it cooped up in a West Auckland pound, prevented from mixing with other dogs or seeing his owners, and spending a chunk of that time recuperating from a mystery injury to his hock.
It wasn’t easy for owner Joanne Paul, either, who said she had months of sleepless nights.
Paul is the owner of Waiheke Movers and Freight on Waiheke, where the dog bit the hand of a visiting business associate who reached out to him back in June of 2020.
She said Zeus could be an anxious dog, having been retrieved from a former life where he may have been ill-treated.
“He was a little bit nervous, and he didn't like people around him when he was eating,” Paul said. “He was scared of feet, so he'd obviously been abused at some point.”
Paul’s daughter first found him back in 2017 wandering their property in poor shape, hungry and mangy. She put up a notice on Facebook and soon the woman who owned him arrived, saying she was looking for someone to take the dog off her hands.
From that point on he was a daily fixture in the garage Paul conducts her business out of, until the morning in June when he lashed out.
She said she suggested locking Zeus away when the driver came into the office, but he insisted and said he knew the dog.
“We’re old friends, he knows me, he said. He’s not himself I told him, and I said I was putting him away,” Paul said.
When the man later reached out to pet the dog he came away with a 40mm by 10mm wound on his right hand requiring stitches, along with multiple puncture wounds.
Paul said she told the dog to stop and he did very quickly, shifting to nuzzling the man’s feet perhaps in a kind of apology.
It happened on her private property, in an office space that was seldom used for public walk-ins.
These were all factors the judge considered in the first trial before Auckland District Court, and were judged exceptional enough circumstances for Zeus to cheat the hangman.
But in Auckland Council’s appeal before the Auckland High Court, Justice Paul Davison KC found the previous judgment in error and called for the dog to be destroyed.
Paul said the fact that mandated training was not on the table despite this being a one-off incident was an example of dog control laws not looking at cases on an individual basis.
In fact, Zeus did have two small spots on his record - a courier driver had complained previously after the dog had leapt up on him in greeting and scratched the man’s belly with his claws.
Another time, the dog had chased and grabbed a chicken that had found its way onto the property with his mouth, although the bird made it away unscathed.
In the initial hearing, Judge Pecotic considered neither situation to warrant a prosecution under the Dog Control Act.
The mitigating circumstances of Zeus being in his own space, confined from being able to roam freely, and the fact that his victim had been standing over him in a way he may have read as a threat meant Paul was let off with a $1,000 fine.
However, Auckland Council was not ready to accept this.
Elly Waitoa, manager of council animal management said the council considered the District Court Judge to have “erred in fact and law”.
“In particular, the test for ‘exceptional circumstances’ has been clarified by the Court of Appeal, and the council considered that it had been incorrectly applied,” she said. “After considering the proposed appeal, the Deputy Solicitor-General provided consent to the council to appeal on those grounds.”
And so the sword of Damocles began to swing above the head of the Shar Pei once more.
It’s not an isolated case of a council having come back after errant dogs once an initial trial fails to see them prosecuted fully under the Dog Control Act.
A case in Tauranga saw a Rottweiler named Chopper narrowly avoiding punishment after attacking a vet - only for Tauranga District Council to shortly thereafter file an appeal of the district court’s decision.
A second look at Zeus’ case saw his death warrant signed, with Justice Davison dismantling the exceptional circumstances Judge Pecotic had established.
“This offending essentially involved a dog reacting aggressively to an attempt by someone to pat it. These are not exceptional circumstances for the purposes of [section 57(3) of the Dog Control Act 1996],” he wrote in his judgment.
"It is unfortunately a necessary consequence of the Dog Control Act that the Court is required to make an order for the destruction of the dog.”
In the time it took for Zeus to go from innocent to guilty and back to innocent again before the final turn-around, he spent 509 days in an animal shelter where he somehow managed to sustain an injury - a small chip off the edge of the bone in his right hock.
He was prescribed pain medication but a conscious exam was not recommended by vets due to his aggressive behaviour - the same behaviour that had him not allowed to interact with other dogs during his stay.
“This meant it was not possible that the injury had occurred because of interaction with another dog,” said Waitoa.
“While we cannot pinpoint exactly how his injury occurred, Zeus was easily stimulated, with high energy. His aroused and aggressive state caused him to frequently jump around in his kennel vigorously, leading our staff to deduce that his injury had occurred because of this behaviour.”
Paul suggested putting animals in the pound without access to their owners or other dogs could contribute to this kind of behaviour.
“Animals that are put in the pound - no one takes into account why they are like that or the whole circumstances,” she said. “The judge said we take human beings and put them in jail and their behaviour changes very quickly.”
Paul said she was not allowed to visit the dog during its incarceration.
Waitoa said whether owners can visit is determined on a case-by-case basis, with the health and safety of Auckland Council staff being the first priority.
“If it is deemed that the dog may become stressed or aggressive once the owner leaves following a visit, this poses a significant risk to staff, as well as causing undue stress for the dog,” she said. “We will also consider the interactions that animal management have had with the dog owner prior to the request, to ensure that allowing them to visit would not impact the safety of our staff.”
Between vet care, surgery and ferry fares, Paul paid out $16,439.89 during Zeus’ stay in the shelter. These expenses were later reimbursed by the council.
When asked why the council was spending big bucks on fixing a dog it planned to have destroyed, Waitoa said without a certain outcome of the trial, there was little choice.
“Although Auckland Council did put an appeal forward, we do not predetermine the outcome. Due to this, the owners decided to seek specialist treatment for Zeus, which Auckland Council agreed to cover in relation to the injury that was sustained whilst at our shelter.”
But Paul questions the amount of time and money council put into the case.
“Why don’t they spend the money reviewing the dog laws, which for all intents are outdated and cruel. It can’t be a one-size-fits-all, but that’s the approach that they have.”
