Healthy Dogs Healthy Communities
Dog Needs
The Proximal Needs of dogs in the Tri-Communities are those things that have direct impacts on an individual and family dog care. It includes obvious things like food and water, and the not-so-obvious things like lay-of-the-land and zoning bylaws, or local dog control, oversight, and enforcement.
Through attending to physical, social, emotional and spiritual elements of relational health and modulating the roles of dogs and other contributors that can bolster or challenge each domain, better balance can be achieved in communities.
[B]ecause of your co-relationship with the dogs, you couldn’t survive if you didn’t take good care of your dogs. So you always fed your dogs first.
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Audio: Genevieve’s Interconnectedness
Relationship Needs
When designing community-led solutions for dog challenges in northern, remote and Indigenous communities, it is important to consider traditional Indigenous relationships with dogs, and how these might inform re-establishment of healthy, balanced dog-human connections. [Ch4., Pg34]
VIDEO: A Dog's Needs
Dogs…just wanna be loved
One participant from La Ronge summarized these contributors to dog health in the following way:
It’s the Maslow’s triangle there. The bottom is your basic needs, so the food, the shelter. Simple. Feed your dog dog food [laughs] and things like that. And if you can, if you have a little bit more money perhaps a little bit more quality dog [food] – it depends on your budget there. And water, fresh water. Shelter, which is I think that’s what most animals including human beings need…[A]nd to keep them healthy, you gotta provide all these things non-stop, continually until the day they pass away or until the day you decide you can no longer keep your pet. I think that’s very basic.’ (LaRonge_5)
Basic needs are recognized as those that were consistently referred to by participants, and are enshrined within existing animal welfare legislation. Within the Animal Protection Act (2018), animal caregivers are prohibited from causing an animal to be in distress, but access to the means to provide for dogs is not universal, and this can prevent communities or individuals from being able to meet dogs’ needs consistently.
[Ch5, pg1-2]
Instinct-Based Living
Some participants also recognized that the needs of dogs vary, and that the ability to express normal behavior, referred to as ‘instinct-based living’, is a fundamental need that is not the same for every dog.
[Ch5, pg1]
We need a vet. Why? Because there's all these dogs that are going around looking for scraps and getting sick. We need a vet, so we can take the dogs in when they need their shots. Why? So, they don't catch any sickness or viruses. In the spring or fall the dogs turn into packs and look for girl dogs and try mate.’
Local Needs
[T]o me, veterinarians have a huge role to play, but I think that if it's just going in to spay/neuter, and just going once a year or twice a year, it won’t be sustainable…There is a great sense of helplessness when a pet is injured in a community that doesn’t have access to veterinary care. People don’t know where to turn which traumatizes many pet owners. Having some basic care would reduce the fear associated with being in direct contact with animals and promote the health of the people and their pets.
Veterinary Care
In Saskatchewan, the furthest north veterinary clinics are in Prince Albert and Meadow Lake. At the time of writing, there are three actively practicing veterinarians between two clinics in Meadow Lake and five veterinarians between two clinics in Prince Albert.
Recently, the primary practice in Prince Albert has declined taking new patients and will not provide emergency services to clients not already in their system. As a result, animal caregivers in the Tri-communities must travel to other communities further away to get care.
It's, when you sit there without those resources, and this is no fault of anybody’s, like, we don't have a vet here full time. So we all know someone that can stitch a dog and a hot minute if you need it. And, you know, ‘does anybody have deworming meds?’ or ‘can someone help me, I need some vet wrap’ or this and that. So I think the community does a lot of problem solving and also support each other.
Local resource gaps and training deficits can be exacerbated by the physical features of the Tri-communities, including lack of community borders, potential for exposure to wildlife and the inconsistent provision of fences to keep dogs contained in yards, and the community’s proximity to the highway.
[Ch.6, Pg.70]
Logistical/Political Hurdles
...as we learned with COVID, you cannot tell people what to do even when you are that municipality. You know, our expectation is that you keep your dog in an enclosure and same with, with cats and this and that. And so, for me, like, how you would ever roll that out, I mean, it would have to be one heck of a sales pitch because it's just such a difficult thing to do. (KI3.2)
With different bylaws and enforcement regimes, the idea of ‘dogs don’t know borders’ complicates animal welfare for the tri-communities.
...in all honesty, we don't have a lot of power with those bylaws, unless we want to uphold that within the courts, which isn't always going to be in favor. So, they're tough because if our bylaw is not being upheld, when we are enforcing, and people aren't complying with the fines and the payments or just the different things within. You know, it's a tough one, because it can be a financial investment on behalf of your municipality to continuously be going to court to fight some of these things.