Doggy delight — and despair

A two-year impasse could end if the Far North District Council passes a new dog management bylaw with greatly reduced restrictions on canine beach access.

A review of the 2006 bylaw, which began in 2016, sparked howls of protest from dog owners, who formed Bay of Islands WatchDogs to fight it. The bylaw has since been binned, rewritten and reconsulted on a number of times.

The latest version has been welcomed by WatchDogs, but has enraged conservationists, including Russell’s Eion Harwood, who described it as “a complete disaster for wildlife”.

“After all the time and process, and tens of thousands of hours of people’s time and effort, this is what they came up with? The council should be ashamed for not providing any safeguards for our kiwi and shore-nesting birds,” he said. Of particular concern was that offleash dogs would be permitted on all beaches, prohibitions on just four.

That, Mr Harwood said, was “another kick in the guts from the council”.

The Dog Management Bylaw and Policy due to be voted on today was hammered out on November 27 after a record 1215 public submissions were received. Among other things, it drops the proposed new provision for beach-nesting shorebirds, added late in the consultation process, but

with defines a small number of ‘special character’ beaches with high conservation or cultural values, where dogs will be banned year round.

As in the current bylaw, dogs are banned from all playgrounds and public pools, but council-owned sports grounds are off-leash, except when in use for sports events. Dogs are permitted on-leash on publicly-owned sections of the Twin Coast Cycle Trail and prohibited on private sections.