Is there breed-specific legislation in your state? The interactive map above, created and maintained by the Animal Farm Foundation, offers the most up-to-date, geo-tagged listing of breed restrictions and bans currently in place, plus rejected or repealed breed-discriminatory legislation across the country. Do you know of state, county or city/town-level breed-related legislation or repealed laws not included in this map? Let the Animal Farm Foundation know by contacting it via the “Contact” page on its website.
What is breed-specific legislation?
According to the Animal Legal and Historical Center at the Michigan University College of Law, “breed-specific legislation” refers to any “law or statute that equates the qualities of a dangerous dog with a certain breed, and bans or restricts certain breeds based on identity, not behavior of a specific animal.”
Attorney Linda S. Weiss, who authored the ALHC report, noted in the document that such legislation usually fails to make exceptions for animals like police, therapy and assistance dogs that can fall under breed bans.
Who opposed breed restrictions and bans?
While proponents of BSL argue that such legislation makes communities safer, numerous animal-related groups, including the American Kennel Club, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the American Veterinary Medical Association and the Humane Society of the United States oppose laws and regulations that discriminate against certain dogs based on breed.
They argue that an entire group of animals should not be banned based on the actions of a few, who were likely bred and raised to display aggression, were probably abused or neglected, and kept unsterilized. They also advocate for placing greater responsibility for dog behavior on individual dog owners.
It’s not just animal groups that oppose breed-based discrimination. So do the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Bar Association, and the Department of Justice. Most recently, a White House position statement released in August 2013 included the following sentence: “We don’t support breed-specific legislation — research shows that bans on certain types of dogs are largely ineffective and often a waste of public resources.”
You might think that if any one group of people would be likely to support BSL/BDL, it might be animal control officers, who deal with dangerous pit bulls more frequently than most people and are called to respond when dogs attack people and animals. But even the National Animal Control Association, in a policy brief, states that “dangerous and/or vicious animals should be labeled as such as a result of their actions or behavior and not because of their breed.”
“People tend to like specificity, so the term ‘breed-specific legislation’ may sit well with those who aren’t very familiar with this issue,” said Ledy VanKavage, the senior legislative attorney for Best Friends Animal Society. “But there’s nothing specific about BSL. We need to call these laws what they really are: breed-discriminatory laws.”
She also calls BDL “panicked policy-making” that tramples on the property and due-process rights of responsible pet owners.
When her organization gets wind of a city or township that’s considering BSL/BDL, it sends members of the city or town council a letter explaining the group’s position and why local lawmakers should shoot down breed-focused legislation. Best Friends also point legislators to acalculator on its website that explains the potential financial impact of BSL/BDL on communities.
“Studies done in countries that had breed-discriminatory provisions, such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany, found that these laws failed to reduce the number of dog bites,” notes that letter. “Indeed, the entities that enacted breed discrimination actually saw their dog bite incidents increase.”
Caitlin Quinn, the AFF foundation manager, is another vocal opponent of breed-based discrimination.
“There has never been any evidence to support the idea that breed-specific laws contribute to safe communities or increased public safety,” she said. “Instead, breed-specific legislation focuses on the dog without addressing dog behavior and ownership responsibility, while diverting resources and failing to protect the public from nuisance and dangerous dogs of all kinds.”
In Sioux City, Iowa, opponents of breed discrimination point a 2009 incident as proof that breed discrimination doesn’t make communities any safer. City Iowa Councilman Aaron Rochester helped push through a pit bull ban within city limits, arguing that pit bulls are the types of dogs most likely to attack people. But then, his own dog, a yellow Labrador retriever, attacked a neighbor, who required five stitches for the wound. His dog was deemed vicious by the city, and according to city code, had to be euthanized. Rochester’s appeals were unsuccessful, and the dog was seized. In an odd turn of events, Jake the dog was stolen from the animal shelter where he was being held until he could be euthanized.
What’s behind pit bull restrictions and bans?
Source: Cynthia Gomez
Most, but not all, the research supports breed-neutral dog laws. A study of dog bite cases before and after a breed ban in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and comparison of incidents in jurisdictions in Manitoba with and without breed bans found that BSL/BDL decreased the number of dog-bite hospitalizations. That research, published in Injury Prevention was led by Malathi Raghavan, a professor at the University of Manitoba’s Department of Health Sciences. Raghavan was not available for comment.
Among private citizens who believe BSL/BDL is needed to keep communities safe, some common concerns are that regardless of how responsible some pet owners may be, pit bulls are bred to be predators and that people who own them often gravitate to those dogs because of their propensity for violence.
Then there are so-called victims groups like DogsBite.org, which support BSL/BDL because “dangerous dog laws that are non-breed-specific punish a dog owner after an attack and subsequently leave new victims in their wake.”
DogsBite.org Founder Colleen Lynn wrote a May 2013 column in the Orlando Sentinel in which she outlined in detail her support of pit bull bans and restrictions.
“Whether to ban pit bulls is a human health and safety issue that should be steered by health and safety officials. Public safety is not the profession of animal advocates,” she wrote.
According to Lynn, 13 of the 14 Americans killed by dogs in the first half of 2013 were killed by pit bulls and pit mixes. Those figures may deceive though, because it’s unclear whether all the dogs involved in those attacks were caught and submitted to DNA analysis to confirm that they were actually pit bulls or pit mixes, and many breeds and breed mixes can resemble pit bulls without actually having any pit bull DNA.
Lynn’s organization is often accused of fuzzy math, because there’s no true way of knowing how many dog attacks across the country are attributable to pit bulls. No government agency currently tracks that. It would be too difficult to do so accurately, because DNA testing would be required of every dog involved in an attack, and not all attacks are reported to the authorities. Plus, not all dogs responsible for attacks are caught.
Despite all that, Lynn believes pit bulls are naturally inclined to “attack without warning” and inflict injuries more serious than what other dogs are capable of inflicting because they have a “hold-and-shake bite style,” and “tenaciously refuse to stop an attack once begun.”
Lynn cites a study published in 2011 in the Annals of Surgery titled, “Mortality, Mauling and Maiming by Vicious Dogs,” which found that “attacks by pit bulls are associated with higher morbidity rates, higher hospital charges, and a higher risk of death than are attacks by other breeds of dogs.”
A message to Lynn’s organization went unreturned.
Further, not all animal-rights groups stand against breed-specific measures. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has been criticized for not opposing breed restrictions and bans. Aposition statement on its website explains that the organization’s lack of opposition for BSL/BDL stems from the fact that pit bulls, like various other types of dogs, are extremely overbred.
“If someone proposed a ban on breeding Labrador Retrievers or Chihuahuas or Poodles (you get the picture – any dog), we’d be for those too,” it states.
But BSL/BDL doesn’t just impose restrictions on breeding or mandatory spaying/neutering, and often breeding restrictions or sterilization requirements aren’t spelled out at all in such laws. Additionally, animal-welfare groups that oppose breed discrimination typically support spaying and neutering, not just of pit bulls, but of all dogs.
There’s more evidence that PETA is anti-pit bulls. A 2005 article written by PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk and published in the San Francisco Chronicle stated her support of shelter policies that automatically destruct any pit bulls that come through their doors.
What might the future hold?
Advocacy by respected animal-welfare groups, pushback from animal advocates and pet owners, and guidance from the DOJ and CDC may be partly responsible for the retreat of BSL/BDL. But consideration of the fiscal impact of breed bans may also be encouraging movement away from breed discrimination on legislators’ part.
“Animal control officers, police officers and municipal lawyers often spend hundreds of man-hours enforcing BDL because of the complexity of issues that surround these cases,” noted a report titled “The Fiscal Impact of Breed Discriminatory Laws at the Dawn of Doggy DNA,” co-authored by VanKavage. “Municipalities that enact BDL have the burden of proving that a dog is of the outlawed breed either through a preponderance of the evidence in most civil cases or beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases.”
Other costs associated with BSL/BDL are kenneling of seized animals, DNA testing, veterinary care and euthanasia. That report noted that the economic impact of a breed ban in Chicago was estimated to be $3,950,530 annually. The Platte Institute for Economic Research sided with Best Friends’ argument that breed bans are a waste of taxpayers’ money.
That’s not to say organizations like VanKavage’s don’t support dangerous dogs control. They support laws and regulations on dangerous dogs that rely on individual animals’ behavior rather than breed, and that place greater emphasis on dealing with irresponsible dog owners than on punishing animals who have not behaved aggressively.
“Regulating breeds puts the focus on the dogs, without addressing owner behavior and owner responsibility to the animal and the community,” notes the Animal Farm Foundation on its website.
Meanwhile, Weiss’ report noted that the constitutionality of BSL/BDL remains in question, as breed bans have been upheld in some cases and struck down in others. BSL/BDL challenges that have had the most success have argued that such laws are unconstitutionally vague, according to the American Bar Association.
Perhaps the most widely publicized and contested pit bull ban in the country is that currently in place in Denver. It was enacted in 1989 and has since been upheld in various legal battles, both at the state and federal levels. The most recent effort to repeal Denver’s pit bull ban involved a claim that the ban violated federal law.
That suit relied on the DOJ guidance stating that breed-discrimination with regard service animals is prohibited in the ADA. But in July 2013, a federal judge dismissed that claim, ruling that the city does enough to exempt service animals from its breed ban.
DogsBite.org calls that “the beacon that illustrates the legal validity of breed-specific pit bull laws.”
Colorado is among the states that have made it illegal for cities and towns to enact legislation discriminating against certain types of dogs based on breed alone. But despite that, the Denver breed ban has survived, partly because it was in place before the state law banning BSL/BDL.
In the July/August 2005 issue of Municipal Lawyer, Kory A. Nelson, a senior assistant attorney for the City & County of Denver, wrote that “breed-specific legislation is still a viable option.”
But the tide may now be turning in favor of those who oppose breed discrimination. After years of BSL/BDL gaining steam across the country, at least 16 states — including Connecticut, Nevada and Rhode Island most recently — now have legislation to prohibit localities from enacting breed bans. At the local level, the trend seems to be moving away from BSL/BDL as well. The Animal Farm Foundation noted on its site that “since January 2012, breed-specific legislation is consistently being repealed or rejected more than it is being passed or considered.”
Of her organization’s BSL map, Quinn said, “Happily, we have to update it often because more and more communities/municipalities are overturning or rejecting breed-specific laws in favor of responsible dog ownership practices.”
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