As attacks surge, calls grow to overhaul NZ’s 30-year-old dog control laws

“This pitbull-staffie-cross just pinned her down, biting down on her leg. I was screaming – how can you let this happen again?”

A couple of years earlier, the same dog had attacked a younger Lucy.

“You think it is an isolated incident, that the owner feels terrible about it and will take measures to control that dog, so I didn’t report it. Now I know.”

This time the owner had to sit on the dog to allow Michelle to grab Lucy and run for home, blood pouring from Lucy’s leg. The vet had to drain and dress the wound; further surgery was needed to repair a knee smashed during the encounter.

Facebook posts suggest the offending dog was known to the community but dog owners have been too frightened to report these incidents to the council. The owner of the dog, says Michelle, is “extremely intimidating” (she does not want her real name or that of her dog used for fear of retaliation) and the council, she was told, will accept only reports of recent attacks.

Dogs might be our best or near-best friends, immortalised in the peripatetic adventures of Hairy Maclary and his canine mob and the huntaway-defying speed of a Toyota Hilux in the renowned “bugger” ad. According to Companion Animals New Zealand, nearly a third of households share their home with one or more of the estimated 830,000 companion dogs in the country.

This number was undoubtedly boosted by Covid – lockdown isolation prompted a rush on puppies, and under level-4 restrictions, desexing was not considered an essential service.

But through poor or absent training, dogs’ blind loyalty and councils’ limited legal powers, those bonds of friendship are wearing thin.

Between 2020 and 2024, ACC claims for dog bites rose from 12,817 to 15,494, most occurring in private homes. (These figures relate to injuries from being bitten or butted by a dog – the much higher but widely touted figure of 28,000 ACC claims relates to all dog-related injuries, including being pulled by or tripping over a dog). During that same period, the annual cost of claims grew from $10.6 million to $15.6m.

Outside these statistics are the fatalities – eight since 2003. Last March, three dogs fatally attacked 4-year-old Timothy Rolleston-Bryan while walking with him and their owner alongside a stream in the Bay of Plenty.

For many surviving victims, the scars, both physical and emotional, are ongoing.

Two weeks before Christmas, 8-year-old Poppy (not her real name) should have been thinking about Santa.

Instead, the Hastings girl was on a flight to Wellington for emergency surgery following an attack by a dog on a neighbour’s property where she was playing with her friend. The 2-year-old mastiff cross, Leo, had torn a 1.5cm by 1.5cm chunk of tissue from her upper lip and ripped her lower lip.

The attack was classified by the Hastings District Council as 34 out of 35 in degree of seriousness. Leo was euthanised and the owner sentenced to 60 hours of community service.

That was 2020. Poppy had to wait until last year before she could have follow-up surgery. At the time of the attack, her mother, high school teacher Katie Mines, noted the remorse of both her neighbour and the dog owner, her neighbour’s sister, but when she started researching the dog’s history, she was appalled to find that just four months earlier the dog had bitten the owner’s niece in Hamilton.

As a result of that attack, the dog was seized and classified as menacing by the Hamilton City Council, requiring it to be desexed and kept on a leash and muzzled in public places. It was then handed back to the owner, who at the time was designated as homeless and living in her vehicle. “How can they expect a person to cage and muzzle when they’re living in a car?” asks Mines.

When the owner moved to Hastings, the classification was not passed on to the district council. A council report obtained by Mines noted the dog was neither desexed nor microchipped. While the owner understood the dog’s menacing classification, it said she “does not take the step to restrain or confine ‘Leo’ away from other people as she believes people know to leave him alone and not put their faces up to him”.

The documentation also refers to an earlier biting incident against another child but no official record of the incident exists.

“So she turns up in Hastings, where my daughter was on a playdate with her best friend, and here’s this dog off lead and unmuzzled, not desexed, just running wild, and then it attacks my kid,” says Mines.

“I’ve worked in animal rescue for a lot of my life – I still don’t blame the dog – but I’m disgusted at the lack of co-operation between Hamilton and Hawke’s Bay.”

Reports of menacing dogs continue to climb. Children too scared to walk to school; Northland residents too frightened to walk their dogs. In another North Canterbury town, a 3-month-old puppy on lead-training is set upon by a neighbour’s dog; a blind man’s guide dog is attacked in Timaru (in Auckland, some places have been designated no-go areas for blind people out of fear their guide dogs will be mauled by roaming strays); a couple in Christchurch are confronted by a great Dane bounding towards them in a dogs-on-lead-only ecological reserve.

Thirteen years ago, Ōtaki resident Glenys Richardson, then 67, was mauled when responding to calls of distress from a neighbour who had been set on by two dogs. One latched onto Richardson’s thigh, destroying part of her hamstring.

“I should have died,” she says now. “The artery going down my right leg was all exposed, and the dog had sort of munched away at everything around it. I should have bled out on the street.”

Charges were laid under the Dog Control Act and the dogs destroyed, but the memory lingers.

“I love dogs but there’s a particular type of dog, if they’re roaming by themselves, then I’m a bit more cautious. One time I was walking on the beach and this dog came bounding up. I kind of flinched, and the person said, ‘oh, he’s perfectly all right.’ I said, ‘but I don’t know that’.”

Last June, Carol Stewart, a great-grandmother in Wairoa, was dragged off her mobility scooter by a marauding dog and had to be flown to Hawke’s Bay Hospital with serious bite wounds.

She told Hawkes Bay Today she’d been complaining for weeks about roaming dogs in the area.

As the numbers of incidents rise, so, too, do calls to overhaul our 30-year-old dog laws.

The Dog Control Act, says SPCA’s scientific officer Alison Vaughan, is outdated. “It’s not up to scratch. It’s simply not fit for purpose.”

The 1996 act requires owners to control their dogs and covers registration, microchipping, leash laws and the classification of menacing or dangerous dogs, while the 1999 Animal Welfare Act establishes a duty of care on owners. Local authorities are responsible for enforcing these laws. Councils, for example, must classify a dog as dangerous if it is found to be a threat to people, stock, poultry, domestic animals or protected wildlife. Dangerous dogs have to be kept within a securely fenced portion of the owner’s property and cannot be at large without being muzzled and on a leash. The dog must also be neutered within a specific time unless there is a physical reason not to do so.

Councils can also classify dogs as menacing if they are thought to pose a threat to people, stock, pets or protected wildlife, or if it belongs to a specified breed (dogo argentino, brazilian fila, japanese tosa, perro de presa canario) or type (American pit bull terrier). A menacing dog, such as Leo, must be muzzled in public unless confined in a vehicle or cage and neutered.

As an incentive to owners, many councils offer discounted dog registration fees if they meet certain criteria, such as having their dogs neutered and restrained behind fences. Parks and walkways can be designated leash-only; dog access to ecologically sensitive areas restricted. Department of Conservation data shows between 2020 and 2025, there were 96 incidents of dogs attacking or killing protected bird species, including kiwi, and 75 incidents of dogs attacking, killing or harassing seals or sea lions.

To curb the growing problem of roaming dogs, the Far North District Council recently announced plans to issue $300 infringement notices to more than 2300 people in the district who have not registered their pets.

Whangārei District Council has introduced a bylaw requiring owners of dogs impounded twice or more for roaming to desex that dog.

“But there’s nobody driving around the streets at night picking up roaming dogs,” says Kaitaia veterinary nurse Donna Badorek, founder of Donna Doolittle’s Animal Rescue.

“Even if you report a roaming dog what are they going to do? Half of them are so aggressive you couldn’t pick them up. Kids are getting chased, cats are being killed, dog fights are happening, but there’s no responsibility for them roaming and no consequence for it unless they are picked up.”

Like many others, Badorek keeps her dogs off the local streets. “Working as a veterinary nurse for the past 10-plus years in these areas, the amount of horrific dog attack incidents I’ve had to be involved in and the horrific wounds and deaths of innocent little dogs – there’s no way in hell you’d find me in a public area with any of my dogs.

“There’s a huge part of the population here that couldn’t give a shit, to be honest, but the majority of people up here are at their wits’ end.”

In Auckland, patience is wearing thin. The council’s 2024-25 animal management report lists a record 3852 “aggressive dog behaviour incidents”, 2864 dog attacks and 16,739 complaints about roaming dogs.

More than 10,000 dogs were impounded at Auckland’s three shelters, up 23% on the previous year. Of these a little more than a third were claimed by their owners, resulting in an unprecedented 60% euthanasia rate.

To address the issue Auckland Council has allocated an extra $5.9 million for more on-the-ground patrolling, increased community education and a free desexing programme at its Henderson shelter. In partnership with the SPCA, which already runs a nationwide animal desexing programme, it is also distributing desexing vouchers in areas of high dog-roaming complaints. Based on average litter size, says SPCA head of community operations Rebecca Dobson, the Auckland desexing programme has already prevented an estimated 345 puppies.

But council powers are limited. Local authorities can require a menacing dog to be neutered, for example, but only a small percentage of the dogs that come through animal shelters meet this classification. Even then, the owner can promise to desex their dog in a month’s time and take it home, facing a possible infringement only if the dog is picked up again un-neutered.

To put this in perspective, says council animal management manager Elly Waitoa, of the 10,214 dogs impounded in 2024-25, only 12% had been desexed. “So it’s toothless, basically. There’s no seizure power. Even if the dog was in the shelter, there is no holding power.”

The result, she says, is the same dogs roaming, breeding, carrying out attacks and fighting other dogs.

“A male dog can smell a bitch on heat 3km away and off he goes. He’s on a mission. And then they get into scraps with other dogs and people walking their little fluffy pets – suddenly it’s killed in front of them. It’s happening far too often.”

Auckland Council is pushing for powers to enforce new fencing standards, detain dogs considered a threat without having to go through lengthy prosecution processes, and to desex impounded dogs or those deemed to be high risk.

Mandatory desexing of dogs, apart from those sourced from registered breeders, would also limit the availability of cheap or free puppies. As Waitoa says, the dog owners causing most of these issues aren’t buying from registered breeders. “They’re going down the street, picking up a puppy from a neighbour or that sort of thing. Mandatory desexing will, over time, reduce the availability of dogs, but there has to be seizure power.”

There are also calls for mandatory reporting of attacks by doctors and hospitals, or, in the case of attacks on other dogs, vets. Currently, says Waitoa, only about a quarter of dog attacks on people are reported due in large part to the fact that most attacks, often on children, are by dogs known to the family.

She gives the example of a grandfather who asked the council to pick up their dog that had, for the third time, bitten his grandson. On this occasion, his grandson was in hospital with a hole through his hand and facial injuries.

“We went and seized the dog. We had the photos, we had the phone call recorded, which you think would be enough evidence to say, right, we’re looking to potentially prosecute or we want you to put this dog down. But the family, including the grand­father, turned up the next day and demanded the dog back.

They said they realised the dog had a sore ear or something really silly and that the child had caused the dog to react. We were powerless to hold [the dog], so that little child wakes up in a hospital, he’s sore, he’s traumatised. Then he goes home where there’s no voice speaking for him, with a dog that he’s terrified of day in, day out, that will attack him again.”

The focus on specific breeds in our legislation has also come under criticism. Aggressive behaviour, says Jess Beer, veterinary behaviourist and president of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, is related more to a dog’s individual genetics and the experiences it’s had rather than specific breeds.

“This is where there’s a battle between modern, scientific, compassionate dog training versus old school ones which rely on punishment and which can backfire and produce a dog less able to manage their emotions and more likely to display aggression.”

Lack of exercise can exacerbate such tendencies. According to New Zealand’s animal welfare code, insufficient exercise can lead to problem behaviours such as excessive barking and aggression. But as many homeowners adapt to smaller urban dwellings, says Beer, dogs are often left with fewer places to do “normal dog things”.

In trying to balance the needs of dogs with those of other city dwellers, many councils are applying more stringent leash laws. Although this is necessary for ecologically sensitive areas, says Beer, “in restricting them more and more we end up producing dogs that don’t have safe places to go to learn how to behave.”

The idea that prohibiting dogs from public spaces will prevent attacks, she says, is “simply not true”.

“The majority of injuries are occurring within homes where animals are not being given freedom to get out and about, where they’re not given access to appropriate training. If we end up keeping dogs leashed, restrained, trapped in their homes, the first time they’re exposed to something that could be threatening in their mind, that could be a kid throwing a ball or a tradie entering the property, they may end up reacting aggressively because they haven’t had the opportunity to learn otherwise.

“So it’s a buildup of frustration and inappropriate breeding practices. I think it’s safe to say a lot of dogs involved in these kinds of attacks have not been bred well or supported well or raised well.”

Outside the home, she says, longer leads (at least 3m) and long lines (typically between 5m and 15m) can be used to “promote natural behaviours such as sniffing, roaming and interacting with their surroundings”, but dogs still need to have good recall and be well socialised.

“I equate it to kids. If you go out with toddlers, you don’t let them run free, you guide them, support them, so they check in and stay close to you.”

People, too, need to be taught how to behave around dogs. If you look at advertising images of children and dogs, says SPCA’s Alison Vaughan, “you will see a lot of unsafe interaction. The cute picture of the child sitting on the family dog, for example – I cringe when I see these things in adverts. It’s unsafe, but it’s very normalised.”

Beer points to European cities, where socially well-behaved dogs go to cafes or pubs. They’re exposed to society but they are also ignored.

“There’s this attitude here sometimes that dogs belong to everyone, so anyone can go up and pat them. You don’t let your kids run up to unknown dogs.”

Auckland emergency specialist doctor Natasha Duncan-Sutherland works with a range of agencies in preventing bite injuries. Her research shows that while educating children about dog behaviour is a good way to get through to parents, it has little effect on reducing injuries. Dog-related injuries against children are often not provoked, she says, and younger children are not old enough to follow educational advice anyway. She calls for mandatory reporting of all dog-related injuries, the ability for local authorities to make calls on mandatory sterilisation, and community-based adult education.

Badorek says that education should also include the responsibilities and costs of owning a dog – worming, vaccinating, training, desexing and home adjustments.

“That’s what comes with responsible ownership,” she says. “You don’t get a dog if you haven’t looked at the potential costs of owning it.”

Across the country, such calls for legislative change are increasing. A petition last year calling on the government to change relevant policies, rules and bylaws and solve the “roaming dog crisis” attracted 1547 signatures.

To address what has been described as a postcode lottery in terms of how councils respond to dog attacks, a second petition urged the government to give councils clear, mandatory national guidelines following such attacks. The SPCA proposes the introduction of breeder licensing and regulation and additional desexing requirements for dogs repeatedly found roaming. Though there have been amendments to the act, including new offences such as dog fighting and severe tethering, reform is essential, it says, “to protect public safety, improve animal welfare, and support responsible dog guardianship across New Zealand”.

The New Zealand Veterinary Association is adding its voice to calls for a standard means of classifying and recording dog bite severity to allow authorities to respond proportionately, as opposed to the current “oversimplified and ineffective breed-specific provisions”.

In an email response, Local Government Minister Simon Watts did not comment on the growing demand for an overhaul of the Dog Control Act. To address the “serious concerns” about roaming dogs, he said he and Associate Minister of Agriculture (Animal Welfare) Andrew Hoggard have asked the Department of Internal Affairs “to explore non-regulatory approaches to support better dog control. This includes improving the quality and consistency of dog-related data.”

Internal Affairs had recently launched a project to refresh enforcement guidelines, he said, in partnership with the local government sector to “support consistent dog control enforcement across New Zealand”.

Back in North Canterbury Lucy the cocker spaniel is still limping and showing signs of anxiety; Michelle is still grappling with a $3000 vet bill. The dog that attacked hers has been classified as menacing but Michelle is worried about sightings of the dog dragging its lead alone.

“What if there’s a small child walking their fluffy dog? I’m trying to be responsible but I feel my concerns are falling on deaf ears.”

In Hastings, Poppy is recovering from her second bout of surgery, with more to come. She has a therapy dog she adores but, at 13 going on 14, she is still “terribly self-conscious” about her face.

“It’s not the dogs,” says Mines. “It’s the way they are treated that is just horrendous. But until there’s co-operation between councils and legislation is put through about (mandatory) desexing, it’ll stay not under control. Because it’s definitely not under control now.”