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Picture an idyllic summer afternoon around the old swimming hole on the historic Cowichan River in rural Duncan when two couples end up in a quarrel and covered with dog dirt.

Okay, it’s not neighbourly — but in a time of scarce court time and judicial resources, did it really require a three-day trial involving several witnesses and a 17,500-word provincial court decision?

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“A significant theme within the evidence of both complainants and the co-accused related to dog faeces,” Justice Parker MacCarthy wrote.

“That term is by no means the term exclusively used within the questioning or testimony to describe dog excrement. Sometimes, it was described by that term and sometimes it was referred to as dog faeces by the witnesses and as dog poo. The term ‘shit’ was also used frequently; that word is described by the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as being ‘coarse slang’ and having origins in Old English and derived from a Germanic base and related to the Middle Low German word for ‘dung’ and the Middle Dutch word for ‘excrement.’”