› Flat Chat Strata Forum › By-laws and outlaws › Reform to Strata Laws relating to keeping of pets › Current Page
I agree with Jimmy and would add that schemes that want to restrict pets to garden apartments are barking up the wrong tree, if you’ll excuse the pun. I think the best way to think about this issue is to remember the laws that apply to all housing. They are that how someone else keeps a pet is no concern of others, unless the manner in which they are keeping a pet amounts to animal cruelty. If so, the appropriate course is to notify the police or the RSPCA. People who live in freestanding houses routinely keep dogs, even though they may only have a tiny courtyard. Some neighbours might think this is ‘cruel’, but they do not have a say in the matter, unless the dog is disturbing them. (Of course, if the dog is walked twice a day, it will be better cared for than a dog in a large yard who is rarely walked).
Apartments should be no different. The only thing neighbours should be concerning themselves with is, ‘is the animal disturbing people?’ If yes, the owner should be fined, the animal trained or removed. I would suggest that strata schemes would probably have more success dealing with problem animals if they all restricted themselves to this question, instead of getting tangled up with by-laws based on pet weight,(crazy when Labradors are irrefutably quieter than fox terriers), or attempting to predict whether an unknown animal will be disturbing (pass the crystal ball). I would add how much open space an apartment has to that list. Someone locking a fox terrier outside in a small garden all day is going to cause the scheme a lot more problems than someone who lets their Labrador or greyhound sleep inside all day on the sofa. At the end of the day, the well-being of the neighours’ animals is not everyone else’s concern. Their only concern is whether they are being disturbed.
And since someone mentioned the ACT, I have to give a shout-out to my favourite strata section in the country – s32 of the Unit Titles (Management) Act 2011 (ACT), which defines ‘animal’ to include ‘mammal (other than human being)’. Just in case any OC was seriously going to entertain the question of whether a resident could keep a human as a pet…….