Years ago, a former coworker had a pit bull puppy who she would occasionally bring into the office on the odd afternoon. The dog would scamper down to my office and we would hang out for a while, until he decided to meet anyone else that was hanging around. While his concept of his own size did not grow at the same rate as his actual size – he thought he was a lap dog – he was a good dog and much more of a teddy bear than a lot of people expect, including the entire city of Montreal, which just banned him.
Pit bulls have a bit of a reputation, and there’s a reason for that. The reason is not the actual dog’s fault, however. Pit bulls are a favorite breed of terrible people, those who want to train their dogs to be violent and aggressive. Which is not to say that only terrible people own pit bulls, just that the terrible people who do own pit bulls are the ones that have contributed to their reputation. Even the name comes from people breeding them to participate in dog fights.
There has been an effort by good owners of the dogs to rehabilitate their image, publicizing stories of pit bulls saving lives, interacting with kittens and babies in a calm and collected way and generally being what people expect from a nice, happy dog. It becomes a nature vs. nurture debate, and if these dogs are happy, calm and non-violent in most homes, it’s not fair to ban the breed entirely. Instead, if you want to prevent injury from dogs, you have to prevent bad dog owners, and educate people more about dogs which is more difficult but the only effective way of dealing with the problem.
This is another problem with the dog’s reputation, however. The kind of person who wants a violent dog is going to gravitate towards a dog that has a bad reputation, and that’s going to be the dog they want to own and train. Then they’re going to perpetuate the stereotype and the dog will continue to be associated with violence.
This does mean it’s more important to focus on the dog’s owners than the dogs themselves. If they can’t have a pit bull, they could easy move on to other breeds. If a dog can be made to be violent, their methods will not be limited to one type of dog. If they have to move on to trying to make something inherently ridiculous into something vicious, like a corgi, they will.
This is why it’s important to make the owner your focus, not the dog itself. While dogs have inherent personality traits, their behavior is also influenced by their home. This means we should take out breed specific bans entirely. Right now, in some jurisdictions, people can be banned from owning specific breeds. Instead, ban them from owning all dogs. If someone can’t be trusted with a pit bull, they can’t be trusted to take care of a lhasa apso. In those cases, it’s just as much about protecting dogs as it is about protecting the public, no animal should be subjected to a bad owner.
It is, however, only natural that people want to prevent any damage, injury or death that could be caused by an errant dog, and it’s easy to understand why a blanket ban of one type of dog might be appealing. It means you’re getting rid of a dog that we know can do damage – a fighting shih tzu is never going to cause the same kind of injury – while also preventing the people who would own such a dog from getting their hands on one. Policing who actually has a dog is much more difficult than just getting rid of any dog that is associated with danger.
It’s the wrong approach though, because it’s not actually fixing the problem. Banning pit bulls from a city isn’t preventing violent dogs, it’s preventing violent dogs which look a specific way. It’s also preventing perfectly good pets which happen to look a specific way, dogs that have nothing wrong with them apart from a set of physical characteristics they share with a dog who was, unfortunately, violent. You’re still going to have violent dogs, they’re just going to look different than the violent dogs you have now.
Breed-specific legislation is being repealed all the time, because it doesn’t work. Take Toronto, since Ontario banned pit bulls in 2005 dog bites have actually gone up. Dog bites by pit bulls, of course, have decreased significantly – no pit bulls around to bite – but this just means different breeds of dog are biting people. The breed-specific legislation doesn’t work because the problem isn’t addressed.
To be fair, some people whose dogs are involved in incidents like bites aren’t bad people, but they might need to go with their dog to an obedience class to better understand how to keep their dog from being violent and better train them. And that’s fine, let’s give them the option. Perhaps put a class in elementary school to teach kids how to react around a strange dog, so they don’t wind up getting bit. What we shouldn’t do is ban all dogs of a specific type. It doesn’t work.
