Dogs: A Nuisance Since 1858

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 5

Dogs: A Nuisance Since 1858

(Specially written for “The Press” by R. C. LAMB) It was recently reported that the City Council’s solicitor has been framing a new bylaw to deal with dogs in the city. This is no new question for Christchurch authorities. In 1858 the Canterbury Provincial Council passed an ordinance known as the Canterbury Police Ordinance which made it a punishable offence to “suffer any ferocious dog to be at large and unmuzzled.”

Six years later when the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society began to get established in the domain, between the River Avon and the Public Hospital, its curator, Mr A. M. Johnson, soon found the dogs wandering about in that locality to be a neverending worry. The Society had in its grounds an Australian emu called Jack, which was a great favourite with the public until one day it was killed by a dog. Two more emus were presented to the society by Mr Hill of the Brisbane Botanical Gardens; but these suffered the same fate as poor Jack. A kangaroo and a deer in the acclimatisation gardens were also molested by dogs in 1866: and the very swans that graced the river Avon were sometimes savaged. Mr Johnson, to supplement his salary as curator, kept poultry as a side line. Imagine his consternation, when, one morning in July, 1872, he found that 50 of his “splendid Bramah and Dorking hens” had been killed by dogs. Sometimes he was successful in tracing the owners of the culprits, and sent them bills for the damage done. Thus on one occasion he sent to a Mr Thompson, whose dog was at fault, the following account: Value of 3 Paradise Ducks at 8/- .. .. fl 4s Value of 1 Cape Barren Goose .. .. £1 10s Damage to netting round enclosure .. £2 6s Total: £5 0s On another occasion, in August, 1875, the Acclimatisation Society’s ranger brought to the curator for destruction a dog which he had found chasing hares in Hagley Parte. At the risk of laying himself open to the charge of being too soft-hearted, Mr Johnson spared the dog’s life. By this time all the young pheasants in the Acclimatisation Society’s grounds had been killed by dogs that broke into their enclosure. Attempts to rear further birds in their place were rendered abortive from the same cause.

Early one morning in May, 1882, John Deans was walking into the bush at the rear of his Riccarton homestead to select some trees for felling. Suddenly he was shot at by a poacher lurking in concealment nearby. In reporting the episode, the “Globe” stated that Mr Deans was able to return the fire with the revolver which he always carried with him “for shooting dogs that may be worrying his flocks.” It was not unusual then for sheep, grazing in Hagley Park, to be killed by dogs. Early in 1883 15 sheep in the Park were thus cruelly accounted for. In March of the following year the City Council’s inspector of nuisances reported that he had taken the names of a great number of people who had failed to register their dogs. Before July, 1884, stray dogs whose owners could not be traced used to be impounded in kennels at the Police Station in Hereford Street. After that they were placed in kennels in the City Council's yard which was on the banks of the Avon opposite the Clarendon Hotel, where the monument to Scott of the Antarctic stands now. The latter kennels could scarcely have been more unsuitably situated; for they are within earshot of the Canterbury Club on Cambridge Terrace—an institution whose

bedrooms were frequently occupied by country members come to town on business or on pleasure bent. It may well have been the broken slumbers of these gentlemen that led the club's secretary to write to the Mayor of Christchurch—just a month after the Council’s kennels had been set up—the following letter:

Your Worship, I beg to draw your attention to the serious public nuisance caused by the dog kennel in the corporation section opposite the club house —from the constant howling of dogs, to the great annoyance of everyone living in the neighbourhood, and trust

you will see your way to abate the nuisance complained of.

The Council's yard, however, was to remain in that place for a further 16 years. Rarely can such wanton mischief have been done by dogs in the city than that reported in the “Lyttelton Times” of November 19, 1886, thus:

Great consternation and sorrow were experienced yesterday morning by the good housewives of certain families near the junction of Barbadoes with Armagh and Chester streets, who, on rising, discovered that their hen-roosts had been ruthlessly broken into and wholesale murder committed. To judge from the appearances it would seem

that two or three dogs—the mischief could hardly have been done by less than tw/>— had made their way through all barriers and set to work with a will to destroy every fowl on the premises. One hen-roost contained 15 fine black Spanish fowls “in full profit,” as the auctioneers say, and everyone of these has been-destroyed. In an adjoining yard things have not been quite so bad, the number of the slaughtered being only eight, and in a third yard the massacre did. not exceed half a dozen. It seems very hard that people's hobbies should thus be spoiled, but in some of these instances fowl-keep-ing was something more than a hobby, and the pecuniary loss is serious.