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Lilyanna — or Lily, for short — is only two and thus likely unable to fully comprehend the rift cleaving about her in what is an otherwise quiet residential neighbourhood in Ottawa’s west end.
Yet the mostly white cat with a disarmingly friendly disposition is at the centre of what is quickly resembling a modern-day version of the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the late 1800s — minus, thankfully, the intermarriage and gunplay. Call it the Catfields and McCoys.
On one side of the property line we have Wayne Burke and Kristine Tilbrook and their 11-year-old daughter, Abigail, with whom Lily lives in their Nepean home. Also residing there are Tigger and Daisy — both cats — and Winnie, a dog. In the household hierarchy, Lily is Alice’s pet. Her previous pet, coincidentally also a white cat, was run over by a car. Tellingly, perhaps, Tilbrook describes Lilyanna as “the sweetest, MOST CURIOUS cat.” Recall that in the world of clichéd adages, the mixture of cats and curiosity never ends well.
“This cat is not a cat,” says a neighbour who asked not to be identified. “It plays soccer with the kids. It chases the ball. It’s super friendly. All the kids who walk home from school know this cat. The cat doesn’t really bother anybody except this one guy.”
This last statement, we’ve discovered, is not true, but for the moment let’s meet this one guy.
Joseph Ladouceur lives next door to Lily, et al. He keeps a nice lawn and flower beds, while on the step beside his front door is a decorative wooden cut-out of a cat.
“For the past year and a month that we’ve been here,” says Wayne, “(Ladouceur) and his roommate would call Lily over and pet her and all that stuff — they were good friends.
“And he would hand her back over when we were looking for her,” adds Tilbrook.
Additionally, when the family returned home from a March break trip to find their driveway shovelled for them, their security camera footage revealed that Ladouceur was the Good Samaritan.
Ladouceur has no pets himself, but he says he loves animals. “I have birdfeeders in my yard. I have rabbits in my yard, chipmunks, sparrows and other birds. And that cat sits and hunts all these things.”
Lily also, he notes, does her business in his yard and garden.
“I don’t like it. I enjoy looking out in my yard and seeing a rabbit munching on whatever, rather than seeing a cat have a turd in my yard.”
The final straw came at the end of March, when Ladouceur took his seasonal car — a BMW — out of the garage for a wash. He left it out to dry before returning it to the garage. The next day he noticed muddy paw prints, white hairs and scratches on the car. A neighbour, he says, informed him he’d seen Lily on the car.
A few days later, he mustered the wherewithal to confront his neighbours about their cat.
According to Burke and Tilbrook, they subsequently talked about what they could do to allay Ladouceur’s concerns. They considered buying him a cover for his car but decided instead to put together a package containing a water bottle, cayenne pepper and rue seeds — items the city of Ottawa recommends to keep cats away. They planned to offer pots of rue to any of their neighbours who wanted them. But before they had a chance to assemble the kit — they had to order the seeds online — the simmering feud escalated.
On April 7, they received a call from the Humane Society on Hunt Club Road, informing them that Lily, who is registered and wears a collar tag with their phone number on it, had been dropped off there. They could come and pick her up after paying a $40 fee. They were perplexed as to how Lily ended up there, but the following week another neighbour came to tell them that it was Ladouceur who took Lily away.
Nearly three weeks later, Ladouceur again took Lily to the Humane Society, requiring another $40 charge to get her back. “I’m going to keep doing it until they learn to keep the cat indoors,” he says.
Tilbrook’s online complaint to police accuses Ladouceur of luring Lily onto his property in order to capture her, an act Lily’s owners admits would take little effort given the cat’s outgoing personality. Ladouceur denies the charge. “I just want this cat off my property,” he says, adding that Tilbrook has taken to verbally taunting him and that the couple has repositioned their security camera and now have it trained on his house. “I feel I’m being harassed.”
Abigail, meanwhile, is anxious about Lily’s fate. The other day, she says, she broke down and began crying at school.
“She’s now afraid of the neighbour,” says Tilbrook, “and scared to death if Lily gets outside. She’s afraid that if we don’t catch her first, he will, and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Burke believes that Ladouceur’s actions qualify under the Criminal Code as theft of private property. Ladouceur says that municipal bylaws allow him to remove a nuisance pet from his property and take it to an animal shelter.
If they share anything in common, it’s the feeling that officials are doing little to help solve the matter. According to Tilbrook, when she asked Humane Society officials whom she could speak to about the matter, she was told to call the city. When she did, she was told to contact the police. There, she was told it was a city matter.
Ladouceur experienced the same indifference. “They haven’t returned my calls. Nobody’s doing their job. I went to By-law (enforcement) and asked, ‘What’s stopping it from happening again? What if I get my car repainted? What’s going to stop this from happening the next day, or in a week or a month?’ And the guy from By-law, his attitude was ‘Just keep bringing the cat back to the Humane Society, and sooner or later everyone runs out of money.’
“At the end of the day, I feel I’ve been doing everything I’m supposed to do and I’ve got no one in my corner.”
Denis Germain and his Boston terrier, Mylo, are in his corner. Germain lives behind Ladouceur, and keeps Mylo leashed when he’s outside. “In 20 years I’ve never had a problem with the cats in the neighbourhood,” he says, “until that one came a year ago.”
Germain says he witnessed Lily take a swipe at Mylo, last summer, scratching one eye and leaving a claw in the dog’s nose. Germain was stuck with a vet bill of about $800. He says when he informed Tilbrook of the bill, she shrugged. He also notes that when he contacted By-law officials for advice, they suggested he build Mylo an enclosure. He’d rather see a municipal leash law in effect for cats, an issue that was most recently in the fore, with much civic debate, when Ottawa and surrounding municipalities amalgamated in 2000. Last fall, meanwhile, the City of Montreal enacted regulations that prohibit pets from wandering or being on private property without permission.
Ottawa police, meanwhile, admit that the matter falls in a grey area where city bylaws and the Criminal Code overlap. While Ladouceur’s catnapping appears to meet the threshold for theft under the Criminal Code, it also falls in line with municipal regulations. The chance of a conviction is close to zero.
According to Roger Chapman, Ottawa’s manager of By-law and Regulatory Services, there’s little Burke and Tilbrook can do to prevent Lily being taken to the Humane Society short of keeping her indoors or building an outdoor enclosure.
“In accordance with the Animal Care and Control By-law,” he wrote in an email, “owners are responsible for ensuring that their cat(s) do not cause damage or otherwise create a nuisance or disturbance either to another person or to another person’s property. In such situations, the cat may be conveyed to the Municipal Animal Shelter.”
The Hatfield-McCoy feud saw numerous murders, nine incarcerations and one public execution. We can only hope for more civility here.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
Yet the mostly white cat with a disarmingly friendly disposition is at the centre of what is quickly resembling a modern-day version of the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the late 1800s — minus, thankfully, the intermarriage and gunplay. Call it the Catfields and McCoys.
On one side of the property line we have Wayne Burke and Kristine Tilbrook and their 11-year-old daughter, Abigail, with whom Lily lives in their Nepean home. Also residing there are Tigger and Daisy — both cats — and Winnie, a dog. In the household hierarchy, Lily is Alice’s pet. Her previous pet, coincidentally also a white cat, was run over by a car. Tellingly, perhaps, Tilbrook describes Lilyanna as “the sweetest, MOST CURIOUS cat.” Recall that in the world of clichéd adages, the mixture of cats and curiosity never ends well.
“This cat is not a cat,” says a neighbour who asked not to be identified. “It plays soccer with the kids. It chases the ball. It’s super friendly. All the kids who walk home from school know this cat. The cat doesn’t really bother anybody except this one guy.”
This last statement, we’ve discovered, is not true, but for the moment let’s meet this one guy.
Joseph Ladouceur lives next door to Lily, et al. He keeps a nice lawn and flower beds, while on the step beside his front door is a decorative wooden cut-out of a cat.
“For the past year and a month that we’ve been here,” says Wayne, “(Ladouceur) and his roommate would call Lily over and pet her and all that stuff — they were good friends.
“And he would hand her back over when we were looking for her,” adds Tilbrook.
Additionally, when the family returned home from a March break trip to find their driveway shovelled for them, their security camera footage revealed that Ladouceur was the Good Samaritan.
Ladouceur has no pets himself, but he says he loves animals. “I have birdfeeders in my yard. I have rabbits in my yard, chipmunks, sparrows and other birds. And that cat sits and hunts all these things.”
Lily also, he notes, does her business in his yard and garden.
“I don’t like it. I enjoy looking out in my yard and seeing a rabbit munching on whatever, rather than seeing a cat have a turd in my yard.”
The final straw came at the end of March, when Ladouceur took his seasonal car — a BMW — out of the garage for a wash. He left it out to dry before returning it to the garage. The next day he noticed muddy paw prints, white hairs and scratches on the car. A neighbour, he says, informed him he’d seen Lily on the car.
A few days later, he mustered the wherewithal to confront his neighbours about their cat.
According to Burke and Tilbrook, they subsequently talked about what they could do to allay Ladouceur’s concerns. They considered buying him a cover for his car but decided instead to put together a package containing a water bottle, cayenne pepper and rue seeds — items the city of Ottawa recommends to keep cats away. They planned to offer pots of rue to any of their neighbours who wanted them. But before they had a chance to assemble the kit — they had to order the seeds online — the simmering feud escalated.
On April 7, they received a call from the Humane Society on Hunt Club Road, informing them that Lily, who is registered and wears a collar tag with their phone number on it, had been dropped off there. They could come and pick her up after paying a $40 fee. They were perplexed as to how Lily ended up there, but the following week another neighbour came to tell them that it was Ladouceur who took Lily away.
Nearly three weeks later, Ladouceur again took Lily to the Humane Society, requiring another $40 charge to get her back. “I’m going to keep doing it until they learn to keep the cat indoors,” he says.
Tilbrook’s online complaint to police accuses Ladouceur of luring Lily onto his property in order to capture her, an act Lily’s owners admits would take little effort given the cat’s outgoing personality. Ladouceur denies the charge. “I just want this cat off my property,” he says, adding that Tilbrook has taken to verbally taunting him and that the couple has repositioned their security camera and now have it trained on his house. “I feel I’m being harassed.”
Abigail, meanwhile, is anxious about Lily’s fate. The other day, she says, she broke down and began crying at school.
“She’s now afraid of the neighbour,” says Tilbrook, “and scared to death if Lily gets outside. She’s afraid that if we don’t catch her first, he will, and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Burke believes that Ladouceur’s actions qualify under the Criminal Code as theft of private property. Ladouceur says that municipal bylaws allow him to remove a nuisance pet from his property and take it to an animal shelter.
If they share anything in common, it’s the feeling that officials are doing little to help solve the matter. According to Tilbrook, when she asked Humane Society officials whom she could speak to about the matter, she was told to call the city. When she did, she was told to contact the police. There, she was told it was a city matter.
Ladouceur experienced the same indifference. “They haven’t returned my calls. Nobody’s doing their job. I went to By-law (enforcement) and asked, ‘What’s stopping it from happening again? What if I get my car repainted? What’s going to stop this from happening the next day, or in a week or a month?’ And the guy from By-law, his attitude was ‘Just keep bringing the cat back to the Humane Society, and sooner or later everyone runs out of money.’
“At the end of the day, I feel I’ve been doing everything I’m supposed to do and I’ve got no one in my corner.”
Denis Germain and his Boston terrier, Mylo, are in his corner. Germain lives behind Ladouceur, and keeps Mylo leashed when he’s outside. “In 20 years I’ve never had a problem with the cats in the neighbourhood,” he says, “until that one came a year ago.”
Germain says he witnessed Lily take a swipe at Mylo, last summer, scratching one eye and leaving a claw in the dog’s nose. Germain was stuck with a vet bill of about $800. He says when he informed Tilbrook of the bill, she shrugged. He also notes that when he contacted By-law officials for advice, they suggested he build Mylo an enclosure. He’d rather see a municipal leash law in effect for cats, an issue that was most recently in the fore, with much civic debate, when Ottawa and surrounding municipalities amalgamated in 2000. Last fall, meanwhile, the City of Montreal enacted regulations that prohibit pets from wandering or being on private property without permission.
Ottawa police, meanwhile, admit that the matter falls in a grey area where city bylaws and the Criminal Code overlap. While Ladouceur’s catnapping appears to meet the threshold for theft under the Criminal Code, it also falls in line with municipal regulations. The chance of a conviction is close to zero.
According to Roger Chapman, Ottawa’s manager of By-law and Regulatory Services, there’s little Burke and Tilbrook can do to prevent Lily being taken to the Humane Society short of keeping her indoors or building an outdoor enclosure.
“In accordance with the Animal Care and Control By-law,” he wrote in an email, “owners are responsible for ensuring that their cat(s) do not cause damage or otherwise create a nuisance or disturbance either to another person or to another person’s property. In such situations, the cat may be conveyed to the Municipal Animal Shelter.”
The Hatfield-McCoy feud saw numerous murders, nine incarcerations and one public execution. We can only hope for more civility here.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
