The British Bobby & BSL

In a horrible kind of way, it is a good thing for us that other countries introduced their Breed Specific Legislations years ago – or it would be, if only this country had the good sense to take advantage of their experiences.

Take the whole issue of where the attack takes place.  The Dangerous Dogs Act that this government is planning to put in place says that “dangerous dogs” can not leave their owner’s yards, except in two rare instances.  By saying this, the Act is clearly trying to prevent dogs from attacking people in public spaces and highways.  If dangerous dogs bite anyone while in the public domain the dog will be seized, and/or possibly killed and the owner fined severely. Fair enough.  England has the same law.

But the British Bobbies are now up in arms about dog attacks.  Apparently 5 officers were attacked by a pit bull type dog in East London recently.  The policemen were well enough after the attack to hold the dog down while a police marksman shot it dead, but injured enough that they had to be hospitalized afterwards.

First of all, this was reportedly an attack by a pit bull – a type of dog that England outlawed over 20 years ago.  Not only outlawed, but passed a Dangerous Dogs Act prohibiting anyone from breeding or importing such a dog into the country.  But still, here we have a case where this proclaimed dangerous dog is able to take on five of Britain’s armed and dangerous public defenders. Unless this dog is over 20 years old, one would have to assume that it was either bred locally or imported.  So much for the enforce-ability of the Act.

Secondly, and this is the crux of the matter that has caused Gareth Pritchard, North Wales Assistant Chief Constable, to publicly express his disgust about the Act,  the attack took place on private property.  It seems that the Dangerous Dogs Act did not take into consideration that policemen might have to enter on private property in pursuit of their duties, so there is no recourse for the officers who were injured.  The police are demanding that the Act be amended to allow the same penalties to apply when people are attacked by a dangerous dog even when on its own (private) property.

You know how they say there are always two sides to every story?  This story has about twenty-two sides.

I wonder how our citizenry would feel about a law being passed that said if you have a dangerous dog, you can be fined $50,000.00 and sent to prison for a year if he bites somebody while trying to protect your property from invasion?

Let us just put aside for the minute the fact that the police were doing a good thing by entering a suspected criminal’s yard.  The point is – how is the dog to differentiate between them and a real invader with evil intentions towards his master?  In fact, the police did have evil intentions against the dog’s master!  How is anybody supposed to train their dog – any dog – to recognize a police uniform and not attack anybody wearing one?  Would you even want to do that and run the risk of the criminals donning police uniforms to get by your dog?  What about postal workers, or visiting nurses or firemen – is the dog supposed to recognize all of those people too?  What is he to do, ask them for ID before biting them on the leg?  Again, the dog is being punished for something it has no control over.

The police are also calling for more powers to seize dogs that they consider to be dangerous.  I am assuming they are not referring to pit bulls, because they have already been labelled dangerous in the Dangerous Dog Act and are therefore seize-able by the police.  So one has to assume that there are other dogs out there that the police consider dangerous and that are not on their Dangerous Dogs Act.  What a wild concept – that any dog can be dangerous – wherever did they get that crazy idea from??

Prime Real Estate

The following story has been circulating the local internet and it came to my in-box today

I trust that each and every one of you had a Happy and Holy Easter. I would just like to share an incident that occurred on Wrightson Road on Saturday 7th April, 2012 between 4 to 5pm.

A 4-door pickup heading west in the vicinity of SWWTU Hall saw a man kneeling on the road and in his lane so he had to slam brakes to avoid hitting the man. Of course a station wagon hit the back of his van since the stop was so sudden. But what transpired next is what is so amazing because it was almost a scene out of a movie.

The guy kneeling on the road was an outpatient of St Ann's Medical Institution. He is from Farm Road Rich Plain Diego Martin. His mother is Mrs King and he was released about 2 weeks ago. He was opening people's car doors and snatching their bags when someone chopped him across his face so he knelt on the road bleeding forcing the van to stop.

He immediately got up ran to the station wagon to try opening the door but the doors were locked so he tried the 4- door pick up (the doors weren't locked) opened the door and sitting in the back seat was a mother with her 2 infant children probably  a 6 year old boy and a 2 year old girl who lay asleep.

He grabbed the girl by her feet and dragged her out of the vehicle holding her upside down. The mother fought back in an attempt to get back the child, rolling and falling onto the roadway bruising her arms etc but getting back her baby. Fortunately, 2 cars behind were 2 plain clothes officers who stopped to investigate and this is the man saying
to them that the van had hit him and that they wanted to beat him. The police soon got the right story and held him but he was too much for them so he escaped again running and dodging the traffic he threw his bloodied t-shirt into a moving car hitting the driver in his face and blocking his vision also causing his face to be covered in blood. He
continued running, flipped over the median and onto the east bound lane, rolled onto the bonnet of a moving vehicle, dodged a few cars before diving head first through the back window and onto the backseat of a moving Matrix sitting between the backseat passengers causing more chaos and panic because the car stopped abruptly and everyone ran out of the vehicle.

By this time the police caught up with him but the more they tried to subdue him the harder it became. Even getting him into the ambulance was a task and the policemen collected some very hard cuffs to their faces. Although the little girl was covered in blood no physical harm was done but both mother and children were traumatised and the little girl
kept asking to go home. I guess because home to her is where she's safe. Further details of this incident can be obtained from the Central Police Station since those officers were on the scene.

The lesson learnt though: Please lock your doors and keep your windows up especially when in traffic.

Councillor Cleveland Garcia
Woodbrook

I found this story interesting because a few days ago I read in the Express Newspaper that the Minister of Health is planning to sell St. Ann’s Mental Hospital because, according to him, it is prime real estate and the government can get a lot of money for it.

He says that the proceeds from the sale will be used to implement community-based mental health care.  He says.  But we all know that is a statement to be taken with a grain of salt.  But seasoning aside, what his explanation logically means is that the government needs the money from the sale of the hospital to establish the alternative to the hospital.  So, St. Ann’s will be sold, the patients disbursed to the four winds, and then a community based mental health system will be put in place. 

Do these people ever think of what they are saying?

He also said that roughly 65% of the people at St. Ann’s should not be there.  I am not sure if that means they are not mentally ill, or if their illness is not so critical that they need hospitalization.  Even if that was true, which I very much doubt, what does he plan to do about the other 35%? 

My brother has been schizophrenic for most of his adult life – more than 35 years – so I have a little knowledge of how the system works, and I am here to tell you that this is, please pardon the pun, insanity at its highest level.

In the first place, does Dr. Faud Khan have any idea how difficult it is for a member of the public to get a mentally ill person admitted to the hospital in the first place?  I have a friend whose daughter is mentally ill.  The girl paces the house at night, talking loudly to voices only she can hear and sometimes smashing things and cursing.  She leaves the house during the day and nobody knows where she is or what has happened to her, sometimes for hours and hours.  She quarrels incessantly with everyone, accusing them of doing her bad things and sometimes becoming incoherent and often violent.  Although she takes medication, attends clinic (or more precisely, her mother drags her to clinic) and is under the care of a public health psychiatrist, her doctors refuse to have her admitted to a hospital.  They say her family just has to understand that she is ill and can not help her behaviour.  Her mother and siblings are nervous wrecks themselves, never knowing what she will do next, or if she will hurt somebody or somebody will hurt her. 

Years ago my brother had a violent episode and when we called his psychiatrist he advised to call the police as they could get him admitted to hospital.  When the police arrived, another family member who had just returned home and did not know what was taking place, told them that they must have received a prank call and they left.  When we called them and explained the misunderstanding they told us they did not have time to waste and they would not come back.  We had to get four men to help us to jump on my poor brother, tie his hands, force him into a car and take him to the psychiatric unit which was then still open in the Port of Spain General Hospital.  Fortunately they agreed to admit him as he was already a member of that clinic. I will never forget that horrifying day as long as I live.  Incidentally, that unit was closed a few years later.

So I don’t know how all of these not-so-mentally-ill patients got into St. Ann’s, but surely that is an indication of a poor system of evaluation and administration that needs to be corrected immediately – and not by the closure of the entire hospital.

My brother now lives in England.  When he first went there he was institutionalized.  A few years later, just like Trinidad, the country decided they could not afford to run a full time psychiatric hospital and would scale down to community based care.  By that time my brother had been released, so this decisioni did not affect him.  But this is the important difference between what happened in the UK and what Minister Khan is proposing for this country – the out-patient/community-based system was already in place when the decision was taken!  This means that there was a system in place for continuing evaluation and follow up of the released patients.  My brother has a team consisting of a doctor, psychiatric nurse and social worker assigned to him.  My mother is his official care-giver and she can call any member of this team at any time if she is having difficulty with him.  If needs be, he will be admitted to the psychiatric unit in the local general hospital, but for that to happen the members of the psychiatric team have to agree that it needs to be done and the police (who have been trained to deal with mentally ill people) have a role to play as well.

But it does not end there.  As his care-giver, recognition is given that my mother also needs help.  They system does not leave her to sink or swim.  If she needs a break, provision is made for the care of my brother and she is given the financial support necessary to go on a vacation.  The case worker will also take my brother out – to the cinema, shopping, to museums, or just for a walk – on a regular basis both to make his life interesting and to allow my mother to have a breather.  If he does not want to go out, the case worker will just visit with him, chat or play cards, watch television – whatever he wants to do. 

My friend has a very difficult time getting her daughter to go to clinic.  My mother used to have the same problem when she lived in Trinidad with my brother.  Now she does not have that problem – if my brother won’t go to clinic, they will do a home visit.  If she is having problems with transportation (hardly likely due to the excellent public transport system), they will send a car for her.

Community based health care systems do not work unless they take every aspect of the problem into consideration.  Total support is essential.  In Trinidad the needs of the care-givers and other family members are not considered at all.  But it is like when you are in an aircraft and they tell you that in an emergency you should put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help anyone else.  If the person helping is not strong and healthy – how can they help anyone else?

Years ago they started to “phase out” the inmates at the St. James Geriatric Hospital.  As a child I remember going to visit these elderly people with my grandmother – just to chat with them, sing some hymns and hopefully brighten their lives a little bit.  In those days, if a family could not take care of their older members, or if there was no family, that person would live at the “St. James Infirmary” as it was called.  As an adult, I used to visit maybe once a year and that is how I found out that the Government had decided not to accept any more admissions.  When the people already there died, they would not be replaced and the Infirmary would be closed once it was empty. 

Not everybody knows this, but the hospital cared for other types of people too.  I think that the reason d’etre behind the hospital was wider than just the elderly. It cared for those who could not care for themselves and who did not have anyone else to care for them. Some people in that hospital had lived their whole lives there.  There was an elderly man who had come in when he was six years old with his elderly granny and just stayed on after she died.  There were wards for people who were severely handicapped, sometimes brain damaged – for instance there was a lady who had been born without legs and was brain damaged as well.  Poor people can not always afford to stay at home to care for a handicapped person, so the only solution was to institutionalize them.  Sometimes family visited these people, more often they forgot about them.  There were wards for the insane – not all the people in these wards were elderly and not all of these wards were clean or well and humanely run either.  Sometimes terrible abuses took place.  I remember going into one and seeing a half naked woman locked into a small room with mattresses pushed up against the walls, screaming and screaming to be let out.  The ward that day was being run by another patient who said the woman had to be punished because she had tried to run away.

I have not been back to the St. James Infirmary since December 2008.  I don’t know what has happened to the people in the handicapped wards or the psychiatric wards or the geriatric wards.  But I agree with the nurse who said that if their families could not take care of them for all years, she did not see how they could suddenly do it now or how the patients would be better off living with strangers.

Which brings us full circle to the patients at St. Ann’s Hospital.  Is this country so cash-strapped that it has to sell “prime real estate” to find money to care for its mentally ill?  Is it really a lack of money that is causing the under-staffing at St. Ann’s?  Is it because we have no money that so many of the attendants are callous and cruel?  Is poor maintenance due to lack of money, so that a ward has to practically fall to pieces before it is refurbished? Are we really such a poor country that we can not afford modern exercise, recreational or entertainment facilities, except those little entertainments organized by the staff themselves? 

I have visited St. Ann’s on many, many occasions. It is a lovely location.  There are many caring, committed, knowledgeable nurses and doctors there.  But that is about it.  With few exceptions (the “Villa” being one), the buildings more nearly resemble some institution called “Bedlam” out of a Charles Dickens book and the care is generally mechanical and indifferent.  There is little friendliness, cheerfulness or happiness in that place – I don’t suppose those characteristics exist in most psychiatric hospitals, but it seems like they are deliberately sucked out of the fabric of people working in St. Ann’s. And no amount of money is going to put them back in.

The Ministry of Health has identified several priority health concerns of Trinidad and Tobago (chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes, non-communicable diseases like cancer being two of them) but nothing is ever said in all the policy documents about mental illness and drug addiction – one sometimes caused by the other – which contribute to more crime, stress and lost productivity in this country than anything else.  So it is no surprise that the Minister of Health can so cavalierly talk about selling prime real estate to fund a system to take care of people that need to be taken care of now and not after escrow.

HAPPY BATHDAY

Today I bathed the dogs.  This is not an unalloyed pleasure.  Rescue, who is 85 lbs, handles the stress by rapidly wrapping himself around my legs.  Unfortunately I secure him with a thin chain to the side of the arbour that covers the porch where I bathe them, and by moving in circles around me, he very quickly wraps the chain around my legs and throws me down (after cutting off my circulation). He does this every time he gets a bath, and because he suffers from “Pitbullitis” (my name for those little bumps that seem to afflict pit bulls at one time or another during their lives), he has to bathe several times a week with a special (and very expensive) shampoo anytime he has an outbreak.

 Sahara, on the other hand, clearly enjoys the whole thing and gives me no trouble whatsoever.  I always try to bathe the dogs when the sun is out in full blast.  But even if it goes behind a cloud, Sahara does not flinch, shiver, slink down or try to get away. She is also very cooperative, lifting her feet for to have between her toes cleaned properly. When you are bathing the other dogs, she is always nosing around and your best bet would be to bathe her first and get her out of the way.

You Can Bathe Me If You Can Catch Me!

Her daughter, Hope, is the diametric opposite.  You first have to find Hope.  Then you have to drag her out from wherever she is hiding (under the bed this time).  Holding her collar you coax and cajole her to the front door while she plants her bottom on the floor and braces herself against any forward movement with her front paws.  When you get to the front door, my advice would be to save yourself further aggravation and just lift her up.  However, as she weighs nearly 50 lbs, and she allows herself to go completely limp in your arms, you had better prepare yourself for a strained back.  One way or the other you will eventually get to the porch at the side of the house and the minute you let go of her collar to reach for the chain, she tries to bolt.  Once you have her secured, however, the rest is relatively easy.  One thing I will say – having her ears un-cropped makes bathing her so much easier.  Part of the problem with Rescue is that, regardless of what you do, he ends up getting water in his ears. And he hates that.  Hope has long dangly ears that close like the seal of a Tupperware bowl over her auditory orifice and washing her face does not bother her in the least. The other dogs have never had their faces properly washed – a wipe off with a damp hand is as near to it as they have ever gotten.

Hope Ignoring Me

Hope does not have Pitbullitis.  In fact, she has the most soft, thick fur imaginable.  Over the months I have tried several different kinds of shampoos and the one I am using now – Hartz Wheat Germ - is very good.  It is also $50.90 a damn bottle.  By the time we are finished she is smelling good and looking better, as is to be expected with the shampoo at that price.  I have to try to dry her off more than the others, however, because the minute I let her go she heads straight for the bedroom where she lies, shivering like crazy, under the bed until even she can sulk no more.  Even after emerging, the cut-eyes continue for several hours.  Today I tried bribing her out of her bad mood with a few Ovaltine biscuits, but though she took them, she did so with a definite sniff of condescension and it did not change the looks of deep reproof that she kept sending my way, as much as to say “that was not cool!”

So, in a desperate and craven bid to get back in her good books, I chose her to go for a walk with Aslan this afternoon.  I take two dogs every afternoon, but Aslan is always one of them because he is the only one who knows how to walk to heel so I can concentrate on the other one.  Although I am going to have to re-think that logic because what he has recently started to do is show off: 

“ Look at me criss-cross in front of you, look at me criss cross behind you – oops, did I tie the leads up like a May pole?  Well, while you’re trying to untangle yourself and avoid falling flat on your face at the same time, don’t forget that if you drop the lead I’m going to run my little ass off and you’ll never be able to catch me. Hahahaha! It’s so funny to take off like a bat out of hell when you least expect it and just about pull your arm out of the socket when I reach the end of the leash – oh, and look at Hope trying to follow me – but she hasn’t gotten down the end-of-the-leash thing down yet, has she?  She gets pulled off of her feet every time when the leash runs out – hahahaha – this is really funny.” 

One day I am going to kill that dog.

I Don't Want to Gooooooo...

The challenges begin the minute we turn off the car engine.  Aslan jumps out first, but I have to keep him on a short leash because we are right next to the walkway with all the runners and walkers, none of whom believe that he is not a vicious attack dog with designs on their throats.  So I have him in my right hand – but I still have to pull forward the seat to allow Hope to get out, and I only have one hand left to do it with.  If he would cooperate and return to the car I could use the hand holding his leash to pull the seat forward while I operate the lever with my left hand, but he is not going to take the chance of being put back in the car, so he keeps the tension on the leash to its full extent while I, holding Hope’s leash in my left hand, try to get the seat forward and her out of the car with one hand.  Hope does not want to get out of the car.  She didn’t want to get in either.  Getting her in or out of a vehicle usually necessitates lifting and carrying.  I need a third, and maybe even a fourth arm. 

Then the key falls to the ground and misses the grill covering the water drain by about a quarter inch.  Which is a good thing because the rain had fallen earlier and the water is gushing and swooshing down that drain at quite a rate.  Eventually, I manage to snag the key and muscle Aslan near enough to the door to get sufficient slack on his leash to position the seat forward.  But not near enough to reach Hope who is cowering against the far end of the seat.  Panting more than a little heavily, I decide the take a chance and, when there is a break in the runners/walkers, I release the lock on Aslan’s leash to give me the slack I need to reach Hope – and we are finally out.  It’s just a step or two away from a break in the railing around the savannah, and at last I can let their retractable leashes out to the full 10 feet.

I use retractable leashes for the two of them.  I would not do it for Rescue and Sahara because they are too strong and they’d probably burst the cord right out of the box if they saw a bird or, God forbid, another dog.  The reason I use retractable leashes is because it allows them to run while I can maintain a walk.  I am sorry.  I do not run.  Ever.

I Like Retractable Leashes!!

Walking in the savannah has its own rules, customs and regulations.  Not to mention problems and stressors.  For one thing, as the dry season progresses there are more and more athletic activities that entail us finding a very circuitous route to get around them.  There are times that we would come across two or three football games going at the same time and in the same area, and there is absolutely no way to get past them than to go through them.  The conversations at that time can become very colourful:

“Tantie, tantie – you ain see we playing a game here, or what?  You kyar jes walk thru jes so.”

“So you ain see I walking my dogs here, or what?  You kyar jes play a game in front of me jest so!  Why you want me to do – fly over?  You feel I am frigging Superwoman or what???”

And then somebody will inevitably chime in:

“So what kinda dog is that?”

And then there are the numerous holes and depressions, all of which I have at one time or another twisted my ankles in.  On a day like today, there is also the mud.  You don’t always see it in time either and the next thing you know you are squelching through a bog while the dogs are happily kicking it back up in your face. 

On the human side, other than the various athletic types, there are the weirdos.  I have seen men masturbating at least 2 or 3 times, been accosted by people who think dogs in general and Pit Bulls in particular have no business occupying the same public spaces that they do, and I was once followed for half an hour by a young woman who kept calling me “Mums”.  On the more positive side, there are lots of children, most of whom love the dogs and want to find out more about them.

You find the strangest things in the savannah.  A “normal” find is a used condom.  More exotic was the time I found a ladies’ handbag with all the contents strewn to hell and back, including a pay slip and ID card.  There are always discarded or forgotten athletic shoes, shorts and t-shirts and even cell phones.  Because of the many vagrants who live in the savannah you also find mattresses, sheets, whole suitcases of clothes and other less savoury signs of human presence that it is not necessary to think about right now.  So you need to be very alert when one or both of the dogs stop to sniff something in the grass – in Aslan’s case this happens about once every 3 seconds.  During the rest of the time he is peeing on every tree and bush that we pass (or try to pass).

Nobody's Leaving Me Anywhere!

Then there are the dogs.  The dreaded Savannah Pack.  Most of these dogs were dropped off by their owners.  When they are first left, you see them frantically running up and down looking for their owners.  Sometimes they would run up to people, thinking that they might be their owners, but this stops really quickly because those people usually shout at them and sometimes even hit them with sticks and rocks.  You next see them trying to get accepted by the existing pack.  If they are successful they have a better chance of surviving as the pack will teach them where to find food, if it is available.  I have heard some people glibly say, “Oh, they are alright – the vagrants feed them.”  These comments are described in polite circles as the person blowing smoke out of their asses.  In all the years of walking in the savannah I have seen one occasion of a vagrant with a dog. The female dogs inevitably get pregnant when they come into heat and the puppies generally die.  The momma dog tries her best, but between the lack of shelter from the elements, the various contagious diseases of the rest of the pack and her inability to generate enough nourishment for her pups, they don’t make it.  Dying of hunger is not an easy death, but it is a fate that some people sentence dogs to without a thought.  I have head stories of why dogs were left in the savannah – he dig up meh garden, I tired of the barking, is my son bring this damn dog here and I ain want no dog to harass me.  But the savannah belongs to them – at least as far as they are concerned – and they take strong exception to me and my dogs and we have been rushed on several occasions.  I used to get really annoyed as it tends to slow down your walk when you’re surrounded by 8 or 10 snarling, barking mongrels.  But I finally accepted that I was the interloper and now if I see them in time I will try to avoid them.

Our routine is to walk through the Rock Gardens and come up the hill on the north side of the Savannah.  It’s a pretty walk and the only reason we won’t go that way is if there are a lot of people in the Gardens who might not take kindly to Pit Bulls.  Today it was empty so we went down.  There are two ponds in the Rock Gardens.  For years the mechanism controlling the inflow-outflow of water was broken and water used to pour out of them – thousands of gallons every day.  They have recently fixed the problem and for a few days after they were fixed they looked really pretty because they cleaned them too.  But since then people have started to again throw their garbage into the ponds – disposable diapers for some reason being the most popular, followed by empty soft drink bottles – with obvious results.

That Was Fun!

Anyway, we were walking alongside one of the ponds when all of a sudden Hope takes off like a shot out of a cannon, executes a flying leap and jumps right into the pond! I really don’t think she knew it contained water, because she immediately turned around and started frantically paddling for the edge.  Of course I had to help her out and of course that involved putting my hands down into the water.   And then I was liberally sprayed with the water when she shook herself dry. 

If your short term memory is bad, please go back and read what I said about Hope’s attitude to bathing.  Also read about the cost of the shampoo that I bathe her with.  And then try to imagine my feelings while I watch this dog, after giving one final shake which did not quite dislodge bits of water lily and algae sticking to her back, happily trot after Aslan.

I really wish I had bought shares in Pfizer – I hear they make an excellent anti-depressant.

After Her Walk/Swim, Hope is Sleepy