Does our new, liberal government have what it takes to throw out the UK’s pitbull ban?

This week, DEFRA considers tougher laws to control dangerous dogs – and rightly so. It’s time the dangerous dogs act was changed and its breed specific ban abolished.

I’ve been talking to dog control experts around the world this year. They say politicians who insist on pitbull bans compromise public safety – bans do not reduce attack numbers. They’re lobbying government to put proven dog control programmes in place:

Partway through a discussion about Ontario’s pitbull ban – a ban deemed a roaring success by UK politicians like Kit Malthouse – the Ontario SPCA’s Alison Cross parts with a fascinating piece of information.

She says that the OSPCA skirts the pitbull ban when it can. When the OSCPA picks pitbulls up, instead of putting them down, ‘we put them through behaviour tests, and if they pass, we try to adopt them outside of Ontario.’ The OSPCA does this because it believes breed bans are useless. You might say the OSPCA is in revolt against breed specific bans.

The OSPCA is not alone. Experts loathe the pit-breed ban phenomenon – and they’re not wild about politicians who refuse to accept how utterly these bans have failed.

In the past few months, I’ve spoken with the Dogs Trust in the UK, the American SPCA, the OSPCA and a variety of dog trainers. They all say breed-specific legislation is costly and difficult to enforce, and a documented failure when it comes to reducing dog attack numbers.

They are – without exception – of the opinion that in the right home, a pit breed dog makes as reliable a pet as any other canine (indeed, American pitbull terriers and Staffordshire bull terriers bumbled along as national US and UK favourites until about 30 years ago).

Dig a little in North America, and you find dog owners, fosterers and sympathetic authorities across North America pooling resources to spirit pit breed dogs out of euthanasia zones to safe localities and states. Some of these escape tales rival the Pimpernel’s.

Not every politician is a knucklehead on the topic – the Italian and Dutch governments have repealed breed bans, and the city of Calgary in Canada runs an outrageously successful breed-neutral animal control programme which, as animal and bylaw services director Bill Bruce tells me, has seen Calgary reduce aggressive dog incidents from about 2000 in 1984 to 158 last year.

To ignore those numbers in the interests of capitalising on a media-driven fear of bull breed dogs is to compromise public safety. I understand the fear – I was once among those who thought bull breed dogs (and their owners) were perfect candidates for euthanasia. Now, I have a bull breed dog and a better grip. I know the dog’s strengths (an exceptionally trusting, good-humoured view of people, which was bred in to allow people to handle wounded dogs in fighting pits) and weaknesses (an enthusiasm for fighting other dogs if not socialised and controlled).

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‘We have to have an agenda based on facts,’ says ASPCA eastern region senior director of government relations Debora Bresch with a touch of exasperation. ‘We have looked and looked at this. It isn’t breed. The [attack] numbers don’t go down. The dogs just change.’

Indeed.

NHS hospital episode numbers show an increase in finished consultant episodes for dog bites and strikes between 1998 and 2008, with an estimated 225,000 people seeking treatment for bites each year. The CWU estimates that half a million people are bitten or attacked annually. A before-and-after study of A&E admissions at the Dundee Royal Infirmary showed little change in bite numbers after the Dangerous Dogs Act (with its pitbull ban) was introduced in 1991.

In Canada, University of Manitoba researcher Malathi Raghavan tracked fatal dog attacks (through newspaper reports) between 1990 (the year Winnipeg introduced a pitbull ban) and 2007 and identified 28 fatalities, evenly spaced, with a low of 1 in 1993 and a high of 5 in 1998. In Winnipeg, the number of pitbull bites decreased after the introduction of a 1990 ban – but the number of rottweiler bites shot up, presumably as substandard owners abandoned pitbulls for rotties.

The Ontario ban has been an outright failure, no matter how Mr Malthouse applauds it. A very recent Toronto Humane Society study shows that dog bites numbers have barely changed since the ban’s 2005 introduction: 5428 bites in 2005, 5360 in 2006, 5492 in 2007, 5463 in 2008 and 5345 in 2009.

I have a city of Toronto report which shows a substantial increase in dog bites or attacks in the last ten years – from 1259 in 2000 to 2161 in 2009, with a peak of 2675 in 2008. The offenders were german shepherd-type dogs, then pitbull-type dogs, then labrador retriever-type dogs, in that order. The costs of enforcing bans may compromise animal control programmes – as early as 2007, Toronto journalists were reporting that animal services had been dominated by pitbulls since the ban, with control and pound services swallowing a disproportionate percentage of the department’s budget.

Cheri DiNovo, a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament and an avid anti-BSL campaigner, believes that the Ontario ban operates as ‘grudge legislation’ – people use it to tell tales on neighbours they don’t care for.

I wonder if the same applies to the UK. One of the more amusing aspects of walking a pit breed dog is hearing yourself written off as a chav. DiNovo says that in Ontario ‘there have been some terrible scenes [with family pets being taken from homes]’ on the basis of their appearance, rather than their behaviour. DiNovo recently introduced a bill for the removal of Ontario’s pitbull ban.

The numbers that the likes of Malthouse ignores are the ones that should be in frame. Unneutered dogs cause the majority of attacks, for example. There are other important figures – the ASPCA says that 84% of dogs in attacks belong to ‘reckless owners — dogs [that] were abused or neglected, not humanely controlled or contained.’

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The city of Calgary’s Bill Bruce knows all of this. His animal control programme – regularly described as North America’s best – is entirely about animal owners. Pitbulls are welcome and people may keep as many dogs as they want.

Bruce says that mandatory licensing is the key: with nearly 94% of dogs licensed, lost and straying animals are quickly reunited with their owners, and owners of problem dogs are easily identified. Bruce’s department is organised around compliance. Fines for unlicensed dogs are high. A team of dedicated licensing officers works on renewal and enforcement. Calgary’s strict animal control bylaw holds owners responsible for all aspects of dog behaviour. The bar for tolerance is low.

‘I often say,’ Bruce says, ‘that you don’t have a dog problem. You have a people problem.’ And – in the UK, at least – a populist-politician problem. Let’s hope Call Me Dave brings them all to heel.