New pound makes life easier for pooches and bylaw officers

Tyson Kalluk spends a lot of his time sweeping away dog poop with a giant squeegee, but he won't have to for much longer.

The 23-year old Iqaluit bylaw officer, who has been the city's point man on dogs for three years, has a new dog pound to work with in a former apartment building off Federal Road.

"This is a much better set-up," he says. "It's a lot easier to clean."

By the summer, he hopes to have a system installed that will allow him to spray the mess from dirty cages into a drain on the pound's floor and into a tank outside.

As it stands now, the building is still an improvement over the city's old dog pound, a dilapidated former storage shed farther up Federal Road with bad ventilation and absorbent concrete floors.

It was also too small, with room inside for only six dogs. Now there are cages for 11 animals, with more on the way.

The new building has sheet metal flooring that's easy to sweep clean. The old cages sat a few inches above the floor, meaning Kalluk and other bylaw workers had to shuffle them around every time they cleaned the place.

It's also more comfortable for the dogs, Kalluk says, because they aren't lying directly on metal grating.

Open only a few weeks, the pound is still somewhat of a work in progress, with separate rooms for cats and aggressive, potentially rabid dogs, still under construction. Bylaw staff also want to build a fence around the perimeter this summer that will allow them to keep outdoor dogs outside where they belong.

"They won't be cooped up in a cage," Kalluk says.

The fence will be built high and without gates, which will prevent owners from breaking their dogs free, which used to happen occasionally at the old pound.

And with the Iqaluit Humane Society running its own facility in the same building, bylaw officers can concentrate on dogs that will soon be returned to their owners or animals that are sick or aggressive.

"Any dogs we deem to be adoptable we give to [the Humane Society], Kalluk says.

This new pound almost didn't happen. The building came on the market as part of an out-of-court settlement between Northern Property REIT and the city that ended legal action against the company after the city cracked down on illegal apartments in industrial areas of Iqaluit.

The company offered to sell the building to the city for $250,000 and perform $50,000 worth of renovations for free.

But the deal, a lease-to-own agreement, costs the city $2,400 month, prompting one councillor to remark that the city could save the money and simply shoot stray dogs.

In the end, with council deadlocked, Mayor Elisapee Sheutiapik cast a rare tie-breaking vote and sealed the deal.

The last thing Kalluk wants to see is dogs being shot. He has two of his own – a cocker spaniel-poodle cross and an "Iqaluit special" that's part terrier and part unknown breed – and says bylaw officers are happy to come deal with dogs.

But most calls to bylaw about stray dogs could easily be prevented, he says.

"If you want to put it outside, tie it up."