ANIMAL PEOPLE is the
leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage
of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has
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TORONTO—The province of Ontario, Canada, will on August 29, 2005
implement the farthest reaching ban in North America on the sale or acquisition
of pit bull terriers, attorney general Michael Bryant announced on March
31.
Enforcement
will be phased in over 60 days. A “grandfather clause” allows
pit bulls already in Ontario or born within 90 days of the ban taking
effect to remain, on condition that they are sterilized and are muzzled
and leashed when out in public.
The Ontario pit bull ban was among several amendments to the Dog Owners
Liability Act passed through the provincial legislature by the Liberal
Party majority on March 1, 2005. Other amendments doubled to $10,000 (Canadian
funds) the maximum penalty for allowing a dangerous dog to escape control,
and eased search-and-seizure warrant requirements for police and animal
control officers who impound dangerous dogs.
The pit bull ban passed five days after three pit bulls rampaged through
an Ottawa residential neighborhood, injuring three people, including two-year-old
Jayden Clairoux. The dogs’ legal owner, Shirdev Café, was
charged with six Dog Owners Liability Act violations, with possible penalties
of up to $30,000 in fines. A 17-year-old girl was charged with three counts
of criminal negligence causing bodily harm. Her name was not disclosed,
in keeping with the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
“Cafe was fined $2,310 earlier this winter for another incident in
which his dogs attacked a four-year-old boy and his 16-year-old stepbrother
as they skated on an ice rink near Woodbridge Crescent,” reported
Neco Cockburn, April Lindgren, and Ken Gray of the Ottawa Citizen.
Bans on the sale or possession of pit bulls and other reputed fighting
breeds have been in effect in the Netherlands, France, Britain, and Germany
for as long as 20 years, as well as in China and several other Asian nations.
Ordinances of similar intent have been adopted by many individual U.S.
and Canadian cities, but the Ontario ban is the first in either the U.S.
or Canada to extend beyond the limits of a single city or county.
The Ontario legislation is modeled after the city statutes enacted earlier
by Kitchener-Waterloo and Windsor, and by Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the
last licensed pit bull died in 2004, 14 years after the breed ban took
effect.
“The experience in Winnipeg and Kitchener was that you began to see
a drop in pit bull bites, even after the first couple of years,”
Bryant told Greg Bonnell of Canadian Press. “We should immediately
have better protection of the public.”
Winnipeg animal services chief Tim Dack affirmed to Canadian Press that
pit bull attacks in Winnipeg have dropped from a peak of 29 in 1989 to
zero in recent years.
The Ontario pit bull ban was endorsed during February legislative hearings
by Toronto police chief Julian Fantino, who in March became the provincial
commissioner of emergency services.
“Pit bulls are the dogs of choice for criminals,” Fantino testified,
mentioning motorcycle gangs and drug dealers. Fantino associated pit bull
proliferation with increasing use of firearms by police officers.
“Our officers are becoming as cognizant of dangerous dogs as they
are of guns when they arrive on scenes of their calls,” Fantino continued.
“At that, multiple shots have to be fired” in a typical confrontation.
Pit bulls encountered by police, often while serving warrants or investigating
domestic violence complaints, “have been trained to attack, and are
being actively used as weapons,” Fantino said.
Both opposition parties opposed the pit bull ban, as urged by the American
Staffordshire Terrier Club of Canada, the Ontario Veterinary Association,
the Animal Alliance of Canada, and the Staffordshire Bull Terrier Club
of Canada. The latter retained noted Toronto trial lawyer Clayton Ruby
to try to overturn the ban in court.
Arguments against the ban include alleged inspecificity in defining pit
bulls and the complications that could occur if pit bulls are transported
through Ontario from provinces where they are legal. A person cannot drive
across Canada without either passing through Ontario or detouring into
the U.S., around the Great Lakes.
Canadian provinces, however, have wider legislative autonomy than U.S.
states and the provinces of most other nations. Canadian provincial laws
are occasionally overturned under the national Charter of Rights &
Freedoms, but mostly for infringing linguistic rights or regulating subjects
not previously within the scope of government.
Organizations called the Dog Legislation Council of Canada and Advocates
for the Underdog have formed “an underground railroad of sorts”
to convey pit bulls out of Ontario, Bonnell of Canadian Press reported.
Others may be doing similar things. Investigating a suspected front for
procuring “bait” animals for fighting dog trainers in rural
Missouri that presented itself as a “rescue” for “dangerous
dogs” and small mammals, ANIMAL PEOPLE in mid-March 2005 found numerous
mentions of both dogfighting and organized efforts to move pit bulls out
of Ontario in web postings by devotees of a band called “My Chemical
Romance.” The suspect “rescue” used an e-mail address including
a reference to the band, but had no evident direct connection with the
band.
U.S.
laws
The
most recent of many lawsuits filed against breed-specific legislation
in the U.S. was filed in mid-March 2005 by University of Mississippi student
Paden McCullough.
McCullough sued the Tupelo-Lee Humane Society in U.S. District Court for
allegedly unconstitutionally seizing eight four-week-old pit bull puppies
and fining him $100, after he brought the dogs home from school in violation
of a local breed-specific ordinance.
“The city of Tupelo has denied any culpability, saying that McCullough’s
complaint is with the humane society,” wrote Leesha Faulkner of the
Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. “According to an answer filed
recently by the city in federal court, a contract with the humane society
calls for the nonprofit to indemnify the city from all legal claims unless
they involve the city’s automobile insurance.”
While Tupelo seems to be backing away from defending its own ordinance,
political momentum in the U.S. has favored breed-specific ordinances at
the local level.
The momentum has run the other way at the state level. Pit bull fanciers,
the American Kennel Club, the American SPCA, and the Humane Society of
the U.S. rushed this spring in Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia,
Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Texas, and Washington to head off local breed
bans and insurance industry efforts to avoid covering pit bulls, Rottweilers,
and close mixes.
Pits, Rotts, and their close mixes together appear to account for about
75% of total canine actuarial risk: about $750 million of the annual $1
billion payout in dog attack cases. [Actuarial risk is the ratio of payout
on claims to the numbers of insured individuals.] The average settlement
is about $16,000, Charlie Soltan of the Maine Association of Insurance
Companies testified at a recent Maine legislative hearing.
The Colorado legislature in 2004 banned breed-specific ordinances, overturning
a 20-year-old pit bull ban in Denver—whose shelters were receiving
fewer pit bulls than those of any other major U.S. city.
Most of the breed-specific bills proposed in spring 2005 state legislative
sessions did not clear preliminary committee reviews.
However, the Washington state house of representatives in March 2005 passed
a bill that would bar insurers from denying or canceling homeowners’
policies based on possession of a particular breed of dog. Now before
the Washington state senate, such legislation is already in effect in
some other states, giving insurers a choice between compelling all policy
holders to subsidize the actuarial risk associated with the most dangerous
few breeds, or simply refusing to insure anyone with any dogs.
An attempt by Illinois state representative Jerry Mitchell (R-Sterling)
to introduce 10 breed-specific definitions to Illinois dangerous dog legislation
was in mid-March amended into a bill that would encourage pet sterilization
and discourage running-at-large, through the efforts of American SPCA
lobbyist Ledy von Kavage.
Von Kavage pointed out that none of the dogs involved in 22 recent Illinois
fatal attacks had been sterilized. However, most unsterilized dogs are
not nearly as capable as pit bulls of inflicting fatal injuries, and sterilization
incentives have so far conspicuously not persuaded possessors of pit bulls.
Mitchell introduced his bill after Lydia Elaine Chaplin, 14, of Erie,
Illinois, froze to death on January 27 after a mauling near her home by
three free-roaming pit bulls and a boxer. Sheriffs’ deputies promptly
identified the man whose dogs killed Chaplin, but neither named him nor
promptly filed charges.—M.C.
