It's easy to have a go at dog owners when their animals attack and that's fair enough in most cases, but it's surely time to take a long, hard look at the penalties courts can impose.
A Reporoa man who admitted to owning eight dogs - a bitch and seven six-month-old puppies
- that attacked a woman out walking in the rural township earlier this year has been fined $2000 plus some additional costs, as we report today. The maximum fine is $3000.
It hardly seems enough for a pack attack on a woman going about her lawful business.
The man's dogs were put down and, while it wasn't revealed when he appeared yesterday in the Rotorua District Court, we can perhaps assume he either put them down himself or handed them over to the authorities who took care of it. Either way, that was the right thing to do.
Not long after the attack, this newspaper interviewed the victim who expressed the terror she felt at having a pack of dogs run at her and attack her. A passing motorist stopped to help get the dogs off the woman, who suffered bruising and deep lacerations to her knees and legs.
It's very possible, if not likely, that if nobody had come to the aid of the woman in Reporoa, she would have been most savagely injured, if not worse.
Had it been a child who was walking past when the dogs decided to attack, the consequences would undoubtedly have been worse.
One can only imagine how terrifying such an attack would be and this sort of thing must be dealt with swiftly and severely by the authorities.
They do their best in most cases but a $3000 fine, albeit a lot of money to many people, hardly seems a severe enough penalty.
As is so often the case, the penalties do not seem to fit the crime.
