The Killing of the Misunderstood 3,500: Denver's Pit Bull Ban

Denver's Westword published some really difficult-to-read material (and heartbreaking-to-see images) in the last month related to the city's pit bull ban. The reports were undoubtedly rough for any animal advocates who saw them, but I imagine that those involved in pit bull rescue and those who ourselves know and love a pit bull whom others have thought "unfixable" may have been hit even harder.

As many readers know, I live with a loving but traumatized rescued pit bull (an American Pit Bull Terrier to be exact), and her recovery from the abuse inflicted on her by humans has been slow. Two weeks ago, she hit a milestone in that recovery (more related to that coming in a post this weekend), but if we lived in Denver or any other city with breed-specific legislation, she never would have gotten that chance; Mabel would have been dead -- killed -- a long time ago. And knowing that perhaps intensifies my own personal anger, frustration, and heartbreak in response to these laws.

First, before we get to the heart of the issues, I'd like to give you the links to Westword's recent detailed coverage. Initially, this story appeared in the paper: "For two decades, pit bulls have been public enemy #1 in Denver. But maybe it's time for a recount." And these posts appeared concurrently and in the hours and days, respectively, to come: "Inside Denver's 'Pit Bull Row'" and "3,497 dead dogs and other numbers from Denver's pit bull ban," the former taking us inside the "row" and showing us the sweet, scared faces of the dogs awaiting death there. Then a couple weeks later came this jarring post, revealing to us the piles of dead dogs (before following this link, please note that the images are difficult to see): "Leaked: photos of pit bulls killed due to Denver ban."

Denver's pit bull ban has been in place for 20 years now, and for just as long, animal advocates have been fighting it. Pit bulls aren't the inherently vicious animals some people -- and laws -- make them out to be, and bans on pit bulls and the mass killing of these dogs defy logic. Consider this, from Westword's in-depth story:

Firearms killed over 30,000 people in the United States in 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On average, dogs kill 23 people per year. Of those, six are killed by pit bulls. As a health hazard, pit bulls rate below bees, lightning and mooses in the number of deaths for which they're responsible.

And study after study has shown that although the number of dog bites has decreased dramatically in the time that the ban has been in place, this is not by any means a clear result of the law -- during the same time period, dog bite numbers across the country have declined in the same way, including in major cities that do not have breed-specific legislation. The decrease in dog bites is a national trend, not one that reflects any sort of success with Denver's ban:

Even Doug Kelley, who worked for Lakewood's animal control before becoming the director of Denver's animal control in 2000, attributes Denver's decline in bites not to the pit bull ban, but to metro-wide spay and neutering efforts and better enforcement of the city's non-breed-specific laws, such as calls for dogs at large.

Stats also challenge another frequent argument in support of breed bans: that pit bull bites, even if not the most frequent, are responsible for the most injury and death to the victims. So how does Denver explain the following?

A person bitten by a dog in Denver is much more likely to go to the hospital than a person bitten in Boulder, Jefferson, Broomfield and El Paso counties, none of which ban pit bulls. In fact, Denver has the highest rate of hospitalization for dog bites of any county in the state. Not everyone who gets bitten by a dog will go to the doctor; one study found that only 80 percent of dog bites were severe enough to warrant a hospital visit. But even though Denver residents are reporting the same or fewer dog bites per capita than residents of neighboring cities, they're going to the hospital more often — which suggests that their bites are worse. And that's not because of pit bulls.

So really, what does this mean? It means that in places such as Denver, the bans have resulted in an increase in overall violence and harm -- because violence against nonhuman animals is still violence. Injury to humans has gone down in keeping with national trends, not because of the ban, but violence against nonhuman animals has shot up, with literally thousands of animals being killed arbitrarily because they have physical pit bull characteristics -- not because they have certain personality traits, not because they have shown signs of aggression, not because they've ever harmed anyone, but simply because they have big heads and broad chests.

The most recent coverage by Westword (an organization I can't commend enough for staying so on top of this issue) relates to which animals are determined by Denver's animal control to be pit bulls. The focus of the piece is how flawed that process is -- how many dogs who aren't pit bulls are labeled as such. How it works is this, and note that "characteristics" refers only to physical characteristics, not to behavior:

[One evaluator fills] out the checklist and then make[s] a determination whether the dog has the majority of the characteristics of a pit bull. Two other evaluators will do the same, then submit their reports to the shelter's "pit bull desk." If two out of three evaluations conclude that the dog's not a pit bull, the owner gets the dog back after paying a five-dollar-per-day boarding fee. If the majority of the evaluators think it is a pit bull, in order to get the dog back, the owner must pay a $45-per-day impoundment fee, a $5-per-day-impoundment fee, a $25 microchip fee, the fine for the illegal-breed citation, and provide a legally binding statement that the dog will be relocated outside city limits within a certain time period. If a dog identified as a pit bull is picked up in Denver for a second time, an owner loses all rights.

But experts have recently determined that the city's evaluations have been way off -- that animal control has been slapping the pit bull label on dogs who aren't. But this isn't even remotely the problem. I can understand how individual caregivers of dogs in Denver might find this important -- how someone desperate to get his or her dog companion back would want to fight against the pit bull designation.

But how and which dogs are being given their scarlet letter isn't the injustice -- it's that people have to prove the dogs they love aren't pit bulls in order to save their lives. It shouldn't matter whether the dog is a pit bull or has physical pit bull traits in the first place. The truth that boggles the mind is that the aggressive golden retriever in one house is perfectly safe, whereas the gentle pit bull down the street who cuddles up at the foot of a three-year-old's bed at night, and who has never shown an ounce of aggression toward anyone, is banished out of the city or killed and thrown atop a pile of other dead dogs.

Pit bull bans and other breed-specific legislation are fundamentally, morally wrong.

Denver, it's time to get rid of that law. Let the pit bulls go home.

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Photo at top, of a dog in an Oklahoma shelter, by Flickr user Meagan

Photo at bottom of Mabel by Stephanie Ernst (i.e., me, obviously)