Toothless laws let pit bulls roam free

A large dog of indeterminate breed, off-leash and in a crowded playground in East Vancouver’s Templeton Park, is bristling and barking at the many children running about laughing and shrieking. When a parent asks the elderly man seemingly in charge of the dog to leash the animal and remove it, the man’s son-in-law threatens to assault the parent. Police are called to the scene but say they can do nothing because the dog is no longer there and the son-in-law denies everything.

A few blocks away, a rottweiler or rottweiler-cross, unrestrained, charges through an open gate of a house on Nanaimo Street at a passing toddler in a buggy being pushed by his mother. She screams and puts herself between the furious dog and her child, waving her arms and backing off. The dog retreats once her son is no longer in sight. A call to the Vancouver pound elicits the advice that nothing can be done if the dog is back on its property and no actual attack took place.

Just east of Nanaimo, in front of a small Vancouver library branch near Hastings and Slocan streets, a pit bull–type dog is tied by its leash to a small tree near the curb. A boy and his father walk by and the dog flashes out, mouth open, and grabs the boy’s arm. It only manages to get a mouthful of jacket, which rips away. The father hurries off with his son. When a librarian is advised of what happened, he seeks out and finds the owner, who goes outside and denies that his dog is vicious, demanding to see the boy. While they are standing there, the dog lunges the length of his leash, jaws snapping, at a skateboarder. It misses by inches. The man unties the dog and saunters to his car.

All these incidents happened relatively recently, within weeks and blocks of each other, and all could have resulted in serious injury or worse. There were no official responses that involved sanctions, warnings, or anything sterner, and the humans responsible were either absent, unconcerned, or as aggressive as the dog involved. Because such things are obviously not taking place only within this small sample area, an unscientific extrapolation of these events throughout Vancouver means there are probably thousands of such threatening, frightening, and potentially harmful—or fatal—episodes taking place every year. And that’s not counting the attacks and bites that actually happen.

Humans outnumber dogs 10-1 in Vancouver. Assuming—for simplicity’s sake and because there are no figures available for multidog households—that every dog has one owner, should 90 percent of the population be held hostage by the 10 percent who own dogs? In actuality, although any dog is conceivably a biter, there are some types—such as pit bulls, rottweilers, German shepherds, bull mastiffs, and various crosses of those breeds, as well as some exotic “fighting” dogs—whose strength and biting power, the potential to inflict serious physical damage in such situations, is far greater than others’. Yet it’s these dogs, and not the laws meant to control them, that have the teeth.

Without precise numbers, it is hard to gauge the extent of the problem. Vancouver city-pound supervisor Bob Cristofoli told the Georgia Straight that there are probably tens of thousands of dogs within city limits. “The national average is one dog per 10 people, so there’s probably anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 dogs in the city,” he estimated. There is no dog census in the city, and no breakdown by breed is available, but it’s reasonable to assume that those powerful dogs constitute less than one-quarter of the city’s canine population, at most. This would mean that 97.5 percent of city residents are potentially held at risk by 2.5 percent of their neighbours.

But just because you have a pit bull or rottweiler or one of their crosses as a pet doesn’t mean your dog is likely to bite, especially if it is properly socialized, exercised, loved, and trained, does it? Of course not, and it would probably be exaggerating to say that even one-quarter of them pose a danger. But even if that number did, we have now at least 99.375 percent of Vancouverites, by a conservative estimate, possibly in danger of an attack by dogs owned by less than one percent of their fellow citizens. Given that some of those dogs would still be properly restrained and confined, with their responsible owners following all pertinent regulations, the number would be smaller still.

But what difference does all this speculation make? There are laws to protect citizens, aren’t there? And those laws are enforced, aren’t they?

Um, yes and no.

There is no compulsory reporting of dog bites or the breeds responsible by doctors or hospitals in Vancouver, so it is hard to estimate the scope of the problem. Its records are sketchy, but B.C. Children’s Hospital alone recorded 313 emergency dog-bite visits between 1990 and 1995. As well, many bites probably aren’t serious enough, in the minds of the victims, to require hospitalization or medical care, and because many of them happen to pet owners or family members, there might be a reluctance to report such occurrences. But the issue of negative dog-human interactions is a hot one in Vancouver, and never more so than after an attack as horrifying as the one by two mastiff-rottweiler crosses that disfigured 14-year-old Shenica White as she walked home last December. Once the dogs responsible were euthanized, however, talk in the media, coffee bars, and pubs about stronger dog laws died down.

The dog-owner and non–dog owner camps continue to snipe, though. The Vancouver park board established off-leash parks five years ago, and they now number 29. A recent park-board staff report, which recommended the board approve funding for a public-opinion survey on the off-leash program this summer, made note of “hot spots” and “problem sites” involving conflicts—at both designated and nondesignated areas—between off-leash dogs and other park users, notably at Trout Lake, Kits Beach Park, and Stanley Park, among more than a half-dozen cited. The board has also identified Jericho Beach, although not an off-leash park, as a site where many people break leash laws. Local newspapers’ letters-to-the-editor pages become battlefields between dog owners and those complaining about dogs, with exchanges escalating sometimes to insults and threats. Complaints to the city’s animal-control staff (604-871-6888) numbered about 2,300 in 2002, an average of more than six per day.

But is the level of enforcement for existing laws sufficient? Probably not. An informal request from the city pound’s animal-control services to the park board for funding to hire a couple of extra leash-law enforcement officers for this summer was turned down. Park-board chair Heather Deal told the Straight on May 6: “Our role is not to enforce.” There are nine animal-control officers in the city. According to the City of Vancouver’s Web site, though, within its borders there are 200 parks with 150 playground structures, almost 400 playing fields and sports courts, and nearly 18 kilometres of beaches. And as pound supervisor Cristofoli pointed out to the Georgia Straight in a phone interview, “We have 1,500 kilometres of roadway to patrol, 24/7.” He also noted that officers have to respond to barking-dog complaints and police calls, among other duties.

So what laws protect us? Animal-control bylaw 7528 (Section 5.1) requires every dog more than three months of age be licensed; Section 4.2 states that all dogs off the owner’s property must be leashed at all times. Yet the minimum fine usually imposed when the law is enforced at all—just warnings are frequently given, according to Cristofoli—is a mere $50 for unlicensed dogs and $75 for those off-leash.

The only part of the city’s bylaw that deals with “vicious dogs” is Section 2 (10), which defines such dogs as those with a known propensity to attack, one that has bitten a human or domestic animal without provocation, or pit-bull terriers, American pit-bull terriers, pit bulls, Staffordshire bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, “or any dog of mixed breeding which includes any of the aforementioned breeds”. In addition to being on a leash at all times when off the owner’s property, these dogs must also be muzzled. A muzzled dog is not a common sight, and there’s a reason for that: the few enforcement officers that there are, spread as thin as they are and patrolling the park and beach hot spots day and night, don’t spend too much of their time looking for muzzles on city streets and back lanes.

Oh, and they also don’t bother to enforce that section of the law.

According to a city-pound employee who would only give his name as Alan (“It’s city policy,” he told the Straight), the law is ignored because it is considered discriminatory. “There is a bylaw that was made up back in the Stone Age regarding the muzzling of dogs when off-property,” he said, referring to 7528. “We don’t really enforce that, though, because it’s breed-specific. We have a range of dogs that are problems, not just pit bulls.”

Asked if he thought that made the bylaw unfair, Alan replied: “Oh yes, definitely.”

Nadine Gourkow, animal-welfare research manager with the BCSPCA, termed the city’s lack of enforcement “shocking”. “It’s not the position of the [pound] staff to choose to not enforce a bylaw,” she told the Straight. She added that “every dog should be licensed,” but she would not comment on whether or not enforcement was sufficient in Vancouver: “I can’t answer that.”

Cristofoli said that the city licensed only about 16,000 dogs in 2002. “Yeah, probably about one-quarter to one-third are licensed each year.” When queried about the number of muzzle-infraction tickets issued by his animal-control officers recently, Cristofoli answered: “Not really many; I don’t think any, because we go on a case-by-case basis and we don’t really have the resources.”

Echoing Alan’s concern about the fairness of the law, Cristofoli said: “Any dog can really be a vicious dog; any dog has the potential to bite.” He added that even a cocker spaniel or a Chihuahua could take a person’s eye out.

After checking his records for 2003 to date and all of 2002, Cristofoli confirmed that not a single muzzle-violation ticket had been issued. He admitted that the enforcement officers from time to time might see an unmuzzled dog that was defined as vicious under the bylaw, but that as long as it was on a leash they would let it go. He also said that if it was leashed, the officers probably wouldn’t bend down to check if it had a licence around its neck. “They can, but you have to think of their safety,” he said, adding, “Sometimes owners get snaky.”

But the real surprise comes when other enforcement figures are checked. Cristofoli said that animal-control officers issued only 57 off-leash citations in all of 2002, with a piddling 14 written so far this year, well below last year’s rate. And owners of unlicensed dogs received, amazingly, just 20 tickets all last year; seven unlucky dogs have been thus targeted in 2003. This when, by Cristofoli’s own estimation, there are between 44,000 and 64,000 unlicensed dogs running about Vancouver and he and his own officers have decided to not bother enforcing the only bylaw on the books that protects city residents from attacks by potentially vicious and even life-threatening breeds of dogs that have been implicated in a majority of deaths by dog attack in North America during the past 20 years.

Put another way, during the past 510 days, the City of Vancouver’s animal-control officers have issued tickets for off-leash infractions at the average rate of one every seven days, with owners of up to 64,000 unlicensed dogs receiving citations at the approximate rate of one every 19 days. Put yet another way, each of the nine en-forcement officers, who are out there patrolling “24/7”, wrote, on average, an off-leash ticket once every 65 days; they hauled out their pens for unlicensed-canine offences every 170 days, or about twice a year.

Nice work if you can get it.

Asked if he thought that was an adequate enforcement level, Cristofoli responded, “Well, the police can also enforce the animal-control bylaw,” adding: “It’s a judgment call.”

Contacted by the Straight for a response, police spokesperson Const. Sarah Bloor replied: “We could also go on transit and look for people who don’t have tickets.”

Bloor added that the police have “always worked in partnership with them [animal-control officers]”. “But from a police perspective”¦we would not be able to undertake that role.”

In a 2002 release (“Aggressive Dogs Threaten Public Safety”), the Canada Safety Council noted that there is no national data on dog numbers, on how many injuries or deaths are caused by dogs, or on which breeds are responsible for the most harm. Bizarrely, up until a few years ago, even the number crunchers at Statistics Canada only questioned sample groups about cat and dog ownership during the course of determining household spending on small appliances. There is no verifiable number, but an April 2003 article in the Calgary Herald quoted unattributed statistics that there are 5.7 million dogs in Canadian households, a number that seems unrealistically high. However, because it is widely and reliably reported that there are between 55 million and 60 million dogs in the U.S.—by its own polling, the American Pet Association claims that as of March 1999, 43,143,849 dog owners had a total of 61,542,900 dogs—and given our demographic similarity with our southern neighbour and the fact that Canada has about one-10th the human population of the States, the Herald number might be close. (The safety council prefers to stick to a more conservative estimate of about four million; the Humane Society of Canada concurs.) What all these varying numbers do show is that the “one dog per 10 people” estimate used by the pound to formulate the number of canines in Vancouver could be low-balling by as much as a whopping 80 percent, given our national population of about 31.5 million.

To estimate the number of dog-bite victims every year in Canada, the safety council quoted the startling annual American bite figures supplied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4.7 million in 1998, and the fact that a 1999 Quebec coroner’s report showed that 117,000 residents of that province claimed to have been bitten by a dog between 1997 and 1998. Extrapolation led the council to declare that about 460,000 Canadians are bitten annually. Populationwise, it’s

a situation as serious as that in the U.S., where bites requiring medical care or hospitalization rose from 585,000 in 1986 to 800,000 in 1994.

Children under 10 years of age, statistically, have the most severe injuries and make up the majority of fatalities, and the odds of any bite victim being a child are more than three times higher than for an adult, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Seventy-seven percent of the injuries to children 10 and under are facial. The American Medical Association notes that dog attacks are responsible for 333,687 child emergency-room visits every year in the U.S., almost as much as the combined total for skateboard accidents, in-line–skating mishaps, playground spills, and all-terrain-vehicle and moped casualties (335,426).

(American statistics are more readily at hand primarily because of the record-keeping of the private insurance industry, unlike in Canada, where most liability is taken care of by our health-care system—for now. The Insurance Information Institute, a U.S. industry group, states that dog-bite payouts in homeowner-liability coverage rose from US$250 million in 1996 to $310 million in 2001; dog bites represent one-third of all homeowner-liability claims. Total annual costs are pegged at almost US$1 billion, and major insurance companies regularly hike premiums, cancel coverage, or refuse to write policies for owners of dogs considered to be potential problems.)

Jacquie Forbes-Roberts, general manager of community services for the City of Vancouver, told the Straight in a phone interview that the probable reason for the scarcity of muzzle-law citations issued by the animal-control department was that the officers didn’t see too many violations in their day-to-day patrolling. When advised by a reporter that he could see several on any given day in his neighbourhood, that no tickets had been issued for at least the past 510 days, and that a pound supervisor had admitted that the law is not enforced, she said: “The bylaw is there to help us when we confront certain issues. But yes, in a perfect world that bylaw would be enforced.”

A lack of adequate funding for the animal-control department wasn’t the problem, she said. “Would there ever be enough?” she asked. “I think the thing to do is raise public awareness. There’s an education component to that as well.”

The BCSPCA’s Gourkow, whose organization has been involved in talks with the city regarding animal-welfare issues and coordinating some future workshops for the recently elected city council, agrees with Forbes-Roberts’s education remark. “We need education as well as legislation,” she said, adding that England enacted tough animal-control laws in the early ’90s. “In England, if your dog bites someone, you get a criminal record. It forces people to be somewhat more responsible. Right now [in Vancouver], people are not motivated; there are no real consequences.” Gourkow said the SPCA is planning to set up a toll-free phone line to educate people about pet behaviour and put them in touch with appropriate resources.

It’s the dog attacks that result in human deaths that get the most recognition, although Shenica White’s ordeal attracted international attention despite the fact that it was a nonfatal event. In March of this year, the killing of four-year-old James Waddell by three rottweilers in New Brunswick shocked the country. In a celebrated case in January 2001, the Crown dropped murder charges against Kingston mother Louise Reynolds in the death of her seven-year-old daughter Sharon after forensic evidence showed that a pit bull living in her home’s basement was responsible for the dozens of vicious wounds to her child’s body. And the notorious mauling death of Dianne Whipple in San Francisco last year, her throat torn out and body mutilated so severely by two Presa Canario fighting dogs that police officers involved sought trauma counselling afterward, led to only the third dog-attack murder conviction ever in the U.S.

A 2000 report by the Centers for Disease Control shows that dog attacks killed 238 people in the 20 years ending in 1999; 25 breeds were implicated, with rottweilers and pit bulls or pit-bull crosses responsible for more than half the deaths. The media reports generated by such attacks are often the impetus for attempts to legislate bans on ownership, importation, or breeding of certain types of dogs. Such laws, whether municipal, county, state, provincial, federal, or international, are generally referred to as breed-specific legislations, or BSLs, and are usually very controversial, coming under concerted attacks by kennel clubs, dog-fanciers’ organizations, and ordinary pet owners rallied by dozens of dedicated Web sites and newsletters. They organize international fundraising and e-mail and letter-writing campaigns to politicians, and they even supply downloadable form letters on-line.

A story in the Baltimore Sun last fall detailed how an Annapolis, Maryland, alderman’s attempt to introduce a bill to restrict pit-bull owners to at least 25 years of age and to have them carry a minimum amount of liability insurance was defeated after the mayor was swamped with calls and e-mails of protest from as far away as California and Canada. And a November 23-29, 2001, article in the weekly Washington City Paper detailed the response received by four District of Columbia council members after they proposed, in November 1999, a ban on new pit bulls in the city. “Then the council members were inundated by pit-bull supporters. ”˜We were totally unprepared for what happened next,’ [council member Kevin] Chavous explains. ”˜[We] got calls, letters, and e-mails from all over the country. I personally got calls from big stars like Mary Tyler Moore and Bernadette Peters, who never seemed to care about anything that happened in the District before, offering to fly across the country to explain why a pit-bull ban was unfair, ineffective, and a slander of a wonderful animal.’”¦Pit-bull supporters, Chavous says he quickly discovered, bore a strong resemblance to gun-control opponents: a small, dedicated, well-organized group of people motivated by their fear of losing their right to own a uniquely intimate piece of personal property.”

Gourkow told the Straight that after Shenica White’s attack, the SPCA and the city informally discussed breed-specific legislation but dismissed it for the time being. “What we [the BCSPCA] are for is behaviour-related legislation.”¦It would certainly have to do with unprovoked attacks, threatening friendly people, things that we should have zero tolerance for.” Forbes-Roberts said the city will discuss BSL in future council workshops but has decided at this point that it’s “not a direction to go in. When you start prohibiting a certain breed, do you prohibit crosses? It becomes a problem of identification.”

In the meantime, a little enforcement couldn’t hurt, even if it’s not “a perfect world”.

Ask Shenica White.

Comments

2 Comments

BRENT

May 10, 2009 at 7:49pm

The rate of incidents caused by irresponsible owners is growing. They off-leash their dogs in public areas, playgrounds, beaches, they don't care to pick up after their dogs and most gravely they behave arrogantly, vehemently, idiotically towards those who try to remind / warn them.

WE NEED TIGHTER ENFORCEMENT WITH HIGHER FINES.

If this issue is not justified by law makers and appliers, people might start taking measures to justify it themselves, which takes everybody into chaos.

Amy Li

Aug 1, 2010 at 12:33pm

"My dog has never bit anyone/any other animal before...this is the first time ever!"