Double court blow for dog daycare as new case emerges
The posh doggy daycare in a scrap with neighbours has lost a key plank of its case to continue hosting dogs.
Auckland Council is now pressing ahead with enforcement action as the Tenancy Tribunal prepares to issue a ruling over potential eviction and a new legal fight emerges from the Employment Court.
Angela Beer’s Pets & Pats business caters to dog owners from some of Auckland’s wealthiest suburbs, offering daycare and overnight kennels. Each weekday morning, a fleet of vans collects dogs from homes in the inner suburbs for dog frolics in rural Dairy Flat.
It’s led to a string of complaints from neighbours upset about barking, traffic from dog owners dropping off their animals and claims the daycare business is operating outside the time it is legally permitted.
A new Environment Court ruling has knocked back arguments from Pets & Pats it didn’t need resource consent to run its daytime dog-care.
Chief Environment Court Judge David Kirkpatrick said council rules meant a resource consent was needed to offer boarding for animals, whether day-stay or overnight visits.
Lawyers for the council said the text of the rules — while not explicitly stating day-stays — showed the intent was to “avoid or mitigate” adverse effects on neighbours.
The court was told by council it would be “anomalous or even absurd” to interpret the rule as requiring a consent for overnight stays but no limit on dog numbers in day time.
For Beer, it was argued that if the rules meant to include daycare dogs, it would say so. Her lawyers said running a daycare dog business was allowed as long as certain benchmarks were met — and had been.
Judge Kirkpatrick said it was a case in which “linguistic arguments” focused more on what the wording appeared to say rather than what it meant. He said the council had a stronger argument that if dog boarding needed a consent, so did daycare — particularly when there would otherwise be “only minor limits on the extent of a daycare facility”.
Pets & Pats already has a resource consent which is what led to the council’s enforcement action, alleging it had breached the terms to which it must abide. That case will now go ahead in the Environment Court.
Beer told the Herald the alleged breaches were “small points”, with dogs arriving for daycare before the consented start time and leaving later than allowed. She said a new resource consent application extended those hours — and the areas dogs could be kept — and would cure the breaches.
She said until the enforcement hearing it was “business as usual for us caring for the dogs”.
“Should we be unsuccessful in our application to extend our weekly daycare hours and spaces, until our new resource is granted, then we will comply. It’s that simple.”
No date has been set for that hearing.
A council spokeswoman said: “The ongoing allegations of noncompliance are under active investigation and all enforcement options available under the Resource Management Act are under consideration.”
The ruling came as a separate case from the Employment Court was made public in which the Pets & Pats operating company, Teddy and Friends Ltd, tried to have struck out a personal grievance case filed by a former dog handler, Phillip Page.
Beer’s company claimed Page had filed the personal grievance claim outside the 90-day period allowed — a position Judge Bruce Corkill rejected.
The decision charted the breakdown of the employment relationship in July and August 2020.
Page denied any violent or threatening behaviour, saying if it was the case, he should have faced disciplinary action. “He went on to say that he felt unsafe and threatened by Ms Beer through her actions of intimidation, screaming and yelling at him.”
Judge Corkill said there was enough to show there was a grievance lodged in the correspondence between Page and Beer and her lawyers in August.
He ruled it was clear Page immediately disputed he “engaged in inappropriate conduct”. He said “it was plain enough [Page] considered that the employment relationship was still on foot” and Beer needed to address the issues he had raised even though he did not want to return.
Beer would not comment on the hearing.
A decision on the Tenancy Tribunal hearing in June is yet to be heard. In that case, the owner of the property claimed she had no idea a dog daycare business was being run. Beer disputed that.