In a statement, Far North District Council\u2019s Hilary Sumpter said it had received 1087 reports of roaming dogs across the district at large during the past financial year, with 396 impounded.<\/p>\n
Biddle said many parents in Ahipara were scared to let their children walk to school on their own, and some residents had taken to arming themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the first time we\u2019ve kind of seen that pack mentality kind of take effect, but my girls have been chased previously by dogs, people now walk around our community with weapons, with sticks, because they\u2019re too scared to kind of go walking without one.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a school at the end of Ahipara that a lot of the tamariki go to, parents don\u2019t let them walk or ride to school because of fear of all these dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Biddle said it wasn\u2019t fair for residents to feel unsafe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis can\u2019t be out of our control. This can\u2019t be a situation in which we are kind of prisoners [in] our own community and can\u2019t just go for a walk or let our kids experience the outdoors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis isn\u2019t an anti-dog thing. This is just anti-irresponsible owners, people that choose to have dogs but don\u2019t choose the responsibility of what comes with owning the dog.\u201d<\/p>\n
He criticised the council for what he viewed as a reactive approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I called the council about these dogs, they said, \u2018yeah, we\u2019re aware of these dogs.\u2019 So if you\u2019re aware of these dogs, what is it that you\u2019re waiting for? What is currently happening is just not good enough for our community,\u201d Biddle said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just scared that the worst-case scenario is that this thing getting mauled is not a dog and it\u2019s one of our tamariki or our kaum\u0101tua or whoever it might be, because that is where I see this going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sumpter said the council was taking proactive actions to prevent future issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe council is currently working with the SPCA on a programme to provide dog de-sexing services in high-need communities,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are also actively following up on lapsed registrations. About 800 infringements have been issued district-wide in the last two weeks for non-registration. Getting more dogs registered and on record means we can identify owners when their dogs are picked up. More infringements will be issued in coming weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a statement, Far North District Council\u2019s Hilary Sumpter said it had received 1087 reports of roaming dogs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[74,156547,5660,46729,9219,2893,111,43,139,69,530,111298,9643,118460],"class_list":["post-278835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-after","tag-ahipara","tag-attacks","tag-carry","tag-dog","tag-fear","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-residents","tag-roaming","tag-spark","tag-sticks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}