Dog noise protesters said barking up the wrong tree - The Best Defence Lawyer in Ottawa

Date:10 Jan 1986

OTTAWA (CPJ - An Ottawa woman insisted in court that it is not the family dog that's been keeping her neighbors awake nights - she says it's her husband. Constance Cousineau pleaded not guilty in provincial offences court to a charge, under a municipal anti-noise bylaw, that her barking dog disturbed the peace and quiet of the neighborhood. She told Justice of the Peace Gerry Binda that it wasn't her dog the neighbors heard. She said her husband suffers from respiratory problems and that , " after lying for awhile in bed, he will start coughing a hoarse cough, very loud." She said the coughing sometimes lasts between 15 to 20 minutes. Cousineau, who says her three year-old Labrador retriever isn't even fazed by the mailman, presented her defence during a trial which had a few members of the courtroom and even witnesses laughing. A neighbor, Catherine Theriault, kept notes of the occasions when she was awakened or disturbed by the noise. She said the dog barked "incessantly" and "insanely." To complicate matters, she said, the noise of the dog's bark bounced off a tin home behind the two properties and sounds "almost as if the dog's head is in my room barking at me." In a lively exchange, defence lawyer Gary Chayko suggested the barking Theriault heard was "a human imitating a dog." Or, he said, "it could also be some human being who was coughing and sounding like a dog." Theriault laughed and dismissed his theory, prompting Chayko to probe even deeper. "How can you distinguish between a human coughing and a dog barking?" he asked. Theriault said she was confident she could. Chayko then tried again with another witness. "You're in bed and you hear a sound. Would it be fair to say that the sound you describe as barking is only a description of that sound and in fact it could be something other than barking which only sounded like barking?". The witness was not convinced. "It was barking." Friends of Cousineau told Binda the dog was good natured and quite a quiet animal. In his closing arguments, Chayko suggested "it may well be that the coughing of Mr. Cousineau was in fact the sound that these people were disturbed by," but Bind a didn't agree. He found Cousineau guilty of violating the anti-noise bylaw, but gave her a suspended sentence.