Robin Heath: Killers roam our streets at night

Pitbulls have been roaming local streets at night, probably looking for cats and/or other things to kill. (File photo, not of dog mentioned in the story).

Our two much-loved pet sheep were attacked and killed by dogs last weekend, in the dark of early last Sunday morning in our back section on Bluff Hill.

One had its throat ripped open. The other died of its injuries later that day. We'd had sheep in our backyard for 10 years.

We would hand feed them every day. They were old friends.

They're now buried side by side. We're grieving for them, for us, and the pointless suffering they went through.

An immediate neighbour, whose property backs on to where the sheep lived, heard dogs padding and panting on the deck outside his bedroom around 5.30am and, stepping outside, caught a glimpse of them as they disappeared up his pathway and returned to the road.

Another neighbour, just around the corner, and about 120m from where our sheep lay dead and dying, heard dogs roaming on the deck of his house at 6am and then saw the two dogs when he went out on the street.

One of them, standing and looking at him on the road only 20m away, was clearly a pitbull or related breed. The other dog, not so well seen, was at that moment rushing into yet another neighbour's property, in the style of dogs out hunting, but was described as having a similar build and appearance to the first.

Later that morning two pitbulls were reported roaming and picked up by NCC Animal Control on another street about 200m away. I do not know who reported them, but thank you.

The dogs were returned to their owners on Hornsey Rd by NCC Animal Control by 9.30am.

I have since heard from other neighbours, nearer to where the dogs live, that they have escaped and roamed at night before. Their appearance coincides with the death, disappearance and mauling of family pets.

They have been seen entering a house at night while a child was sleeping in an adjoining room.

They jump fences, roam backyards and are seen on second-storey decks.

It is reasonable to assume that they are looking for cats and/or other things to kill.

Despite all of this I am told that there is little that the Animal Control department can do.

In our case it seems unless the dogs were literally caught in the act of killing our sheep and then captured - hardly likely when dogs attack at that hour of the night - then there is not considered to be "sufficient proof".

It would have to be a million-to-one chance that these were not the dogs that killed our sheep, given the circumstances, the timing, the sightings, and near-impossibility of two separate groups of dogs both roaming backyards in the exact same locality at the exact same time where pet animals have just been mauled to death.

But apparently that is not proof enough.

So the dogs go back to the owners and we are left to wait for the next time and the possibility, only then, when someone else's pet is killed or maimed, that there might be "sufficient proof".

I wonder to myself what the owners of these dogs must think and feel about all this. Do they really think that their dogs were not responsible for the deaths of our sheep?

Or for the loss or maiming of others' loved family pets that I have since been told about, when the dogs have previously got out at night. Do they think that this was all just coincidence?

How do they sleep, knowing the horror, grief and fear of the children and families that follows these dogs?

There is something very wrong here.

- Robin Heath is a longtime Napier resident.

- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz