April 17th, 2013 by Editor

April 25, 2013 update: According to the Wall Street Journal, HB 956 “died in committee.”  According to its sponsor, Rep. Rodney Moore, “he wasn’t sure that the breeds designated by the bill as aggressive are ones ‘with the most incidents,’ but he said they ‘were the most prevalent by the feedback that I’ve gotten’.”  Really?  So “Representative” Moore proposed HB 956 with no more than anecdotal “evidence” as “proof” that these breeds were “aggressive”?  Perhaps we should lobby for a bill to mandate minimum IQ requirements for potential “representatives.”

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North Carolina HB 956, sponsored by Representative Rodney Moore and co-sponsored by Representative Larry Pittman, has a laundry list of nanny-state requirements (including the type of background checks through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that we have seen in gun control laws!) in order for North Carolinians to own dog breeds the bill defines as “aggressive.”  An “aggressive dog breed” is erroneously defined as “any of the following breeds of dog and dogs that are predominantly of any of the following breeds”:

(1) Pit bull, including the Staffordshire Bull Terrier breed, American Staffordshire Terrier breed, and
American Pit Bull Terrier breed.
(2) Rottweiler.
(3) Mastiff.
(4) Chow.
(5) Perro de Presa Canario.

The term “aggressive dog breed” also includes wolf hybrids.  Read the rest of this entry »

April 11th, 2013 by Editor

From the Palm Desert Patch:

….After hearing from their constituents, the [Riverside County Board of] supervisors voted 5-0 Tuesday to direct staff to draft an ordinance that would mandate spay and neuter of Pit Bulls and Pit Bull mixes across unincorporated areas of the county.

The draft will come before the board at a later date for consideration.

Among the citizens to speak before the board was Willa Bagwell, executive director of Wildomar-based Animal Friends of the Valleys. She spoke in favor of the proposed ordinance, arguing that Pit Bulls fill up the shelter she operates.

Shouldn’t Bagwell know that breed-specific laws, any breed-specific laws, make shelter intakes skyrocket???

Bagwell also agreed with Beaumont City Councilwoman Brenda Knight, who spoke Tuesday. Knight said she had been attacked twice by Pit Bulls, and argued the dogs have a different, more lethal bite than other canines.

“They rip and tear,” she said. “Their bites are more vicious.

“I am a dog lover,” Knight continued, but she urged the supervisors to move forward with an ordinance.

A dog lover?  Really?  Then why support legislation that’s going to see so many dogs relinquished to local shelters to be killed???  And the tired old line about “pit bulls” (whatever they are since “pit bull” isn’t even a breed) supposedly being more aggressive or more dangerous than any other actual breed of dog, is just that: tired, and long ago debunked.  Read the rest of this entry »

March 6th, 2013 by Editor

You know it’s been hard enough watching the doggy killers and the gun grabbers repeatedly muddling “pit bull” ownership and gun ownership — like Gary Stein of the Sun-Sentinel did just this week when he advocated for breed-specific laws and gun control, as one alderman did in Watertown, Wisconsin when they were considering a “pit bull”-specific law, and when a neighbor shot at “pit bulls” who were attacking a boy in Washington, D.C.  But when I see them exploit the dead, well, then my hackles are really up.  What, it wasn’t enough for the gun grabbers to exploit the Sandy Hook dead with their gun-grabbing measures?  Now they have to come after “pit bulls” with their gun-grabbing, doggy-hating spiels?  Judging from what looks like Dogsbite.org‘s comments on an article regarding the Watertown BSL, what looks like Kory Nelson’s comments on an article regarding the Washington D.C. incident, and today, Merritt Clifton’s comments on an article about a boy who was mauled to death by a dog in Galesburg, Illinois, it’s almost as if the doggy killers all have the same handlers and those handlers tell them what to say and do.  What’s another word for that?  Oh yeah, puppet master.

The gun grabbers and doggy killers are right about one thing. Gun grabbing and breed-specific laws (BSL) share some commonalities: 1) They’re both unconstitutional seizures of property without due process, 2) They’re both done under the pretense of safety, and 3) Neither gun bans nor breed-specific legislation make communities safer; in fact, quite the opposite.

And since I’ve watched these evil gun grabbers exploit the innocent children that were brutally killed in Sandy Hook, I guess it should likewise come as no surprise when I see the likes of Merritt Clifton exploiting a dead child in order to push his massively skewed “pit bull” statistics.  Yes, believe it or not, Clifton made comments under the comments section of a WQAD channel 8 story about a boy in Galesburg, Illinois, who had been attacked and killed by what was erroneously called a “pit bull.”  Clifton wrote,

I have been logging fatal and disfiguring dog attacks by breed since September 1982 — more than 30 years. Of the 3,970 dogs involved in such attacks, 2,441 were pit bulls; 3,117 were of related molosser breeds, including Rottweilers, mastiffs, and their mixes, as well as pit bulls. Of the 502 human fatalities, 250 were killed by pit bulls; 371 (69%) were killed by pit bulls & other molosser breeds. Of the 2,194 people who were disfigured, 1,391 (61%) were disfigured by pit bulls; 1,790 (79%) were disfigured by pit bulls & other molosser breeds. Of the total deaths and disfigurements by pit bulls, approximately half have occurred in the past five years. This is, in short, a repetitively predictable phenomenon which is occurring more & more often, and, incidentally, is resulting in about 10 times as many animal deaths & disfigurements by pit bulls as are suffered by humans.

As I have so often done where Clifton’s ridiculousness was involved, I can so easily and quickly discredit Clifton’s “more than 30 years” of erroneous and laughable statistics by simply saying this: “PIT BULL” IS NOT A BREED! Read the rest of this entry »

February 19th, 2013 by Editor

April 10, 2013 update: The bills that would have reversed the court decision (Tracey v. Solesky) declaring “pit bulls” an inherently dangerous “breed” failed.

March 27, 2013 update: The Maryland House and Senate are still at an impasse over the “pit bull” bill.

March 14, 2013 update:

The Baltimore Sun notes that,

…the state Senate on Thursday unanimously passed its version of a bill intended to reverse a court decision declaring pit bulls an inherently dangerous breed.

Senate passage sets up a likely conflict with the House, which has taken a significantly different approach to the issue of a dog owner’s liability for bites. Both versions of the bill set the same rules for all breeds, without singling out pit bulls, but the two chambers set different standards for a dog owner to avoid liability when a pet bites someone.

The Senate set a standard of “clear and convincing” proof that the owner did not know in advance that a biting dog had aggressive tendencies. The House would let the owner escape liability by meeting the lesser standard of preponderance of the evidence.

A joint conference committee could be asked to attempt to resolve the differences between the two chambers. If no agreement is reached, last year’s Court of Appeals decision labeling pit bulls dangerous would remain law…

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After the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled last year in Tracey v. Solesky that that non-existent “breed” “pit bull” should be considered inherently dangerous with little more “evidence” than the standard tripe offered by the likes of Dogsbite.org, the Maryland general assembly has been tasked with overwriting the court’s legislating-from-the-bench overreach via companion bills  HB 78 and SB 160. 

Since few articles on the bills have actually listed the bill numbers so that interested parties could look up the legislation, I am including the links for SB 160 and HB 78 and the status updates on the bills for SB 160 here, and HB 78 here. 

Please continue to monitor these bills, and if you live in the state of Maryland, please continue to offer your support to their respective committees for their passage. 

February 14th, 2013 by Editor

Update from the AKC: S. 178 and HB 5287 have been withdrawn by their respective sponsors.

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You know the only reason I can think of for bought-off, er I mean lobbied, politicians to keep proposing and pushing long-debunked and now embarrassing “pit bull” urban mythology is because they think the dog lobby is too demoralized and the general public is too stupid to fight their ridiculousness.  How else do you explain Rhode Island Senators Chris Ottiano, David Bates, and Walter Felag, and “Representatives” Raymond Gallison and Kenneth Marshall proposing some of the most asinine breed-specific legislation (BSL) – S. 178  and H. 5287* respectively — the dog lobby may have ever seen!?  The two bills are companion bills, meaning they’re the same, only one’s in the House and one’s in the Senate, and both start off with patently false “legislative findings” like that:

 ”In recent years the state of Rhode Island has experienced a tragic series of incidents in which citizens have been attacked and seriously injured by pitbull dogs…”

No it hasn’t because there is no “breed” “pit bull” ‘in existence and so any time you refer to “pit bulls” as if they were a breed, your statistics are automatically erroneous and therefore worthless.  It doesn’t matter if you go on to define what YOU believe “pit bulls” are in your bill, that doesn’t mean those breeds are what was meant by the original use of the slang moniker “pit bull” in the originating statistics.  Read the rest of this entry »

February 12th, 2013 by Editor

Here is the initial article about the proposed ban and/or restrictions, and following are excerpts from the article along with my comments. (Notice in the comments section of the Watertown Daily Times article what appears to be the usual inaccurate schpiel from Dogsbite.org .  So I guess it’s not hard to trace the source of this awful, archaic “model” ordinance.):

Watertown officials are considering a change to the city’s laws that would deem all pit bulls vicious and place new restrictions on the dogs and their owners/The Watertown Public Safety Committee is the middle of crafting changes to the city’s vicious dog ordinance following complaints from citizens about a relatively high number of vicious dog activities in the city, committee chairman Mark Kuehl said.

Now I wonder if these complaints are like the kind of complaints we’ve historically heard about that come from well-placed operatives within (or without) the city who phone in phony vicious dog complaints to generate numbers in support of a ban.  No really, we’ve heard this from more than a few sources and experienced it ourselves, so we know it happens.  And right off the bat, notice the city has stats for so-called “pit bulls,” which isn’t a breed but rather a slang term that could describe a myriad of actual dog breeds and their mixes.  But yet when it comes to spelling out the breeds in the ordinance, it’s American Pit Bull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers, and Staffordshire Terriers.  No one sees the discrepancy here?  Looks like they dusted off an old bait-and-switch tactic.  And the city should know that language like “any dog displaying a majority of one or more of the other three breeds” has been repeatedly ruled as unconstitutionally vague. Read the rest of this entry »

January 24th, 2013 by Editor

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  A guy walks into a court room along with his poser attorney, presents a purposely weak case, and actually sets a precedent for the very thing he claims to be fighting against.  Perhaps this “joke” will ring a bell if I bring it a little closer to home for the dog lobby.  There was this organization in the 80s and 90s that claimed to be opposed to breed-specific legislation, and they went around trying purposely weak cases to actually set a precedent for breed bans because they weren’t really opposed to breed bans; they were really aligned with the same radical animal “rights” group that was surreptitiously pushing breed-specific legislation (BSL) all across the country.

When another organization got wise to what the bad organizations were up to, they started legally challenging BSL properly and they started winning.  The good organization challenged the very definition of what is a so-called “pit bull,” proving over and over again that the vague term “pit bull” did not embody a breed, but rather was an ambiguous term that could describe unknown numbers of actual dog breeds, and that because there was no one breed “pit bull,” statistics on so-called “pit bulls” were wildly skewed and therefore meaningless.  Then out the window went the argument that this “breed” “pit bull” was more inherently aggressive or vicious than other breeds such that the doggy-killers could no longer “prove” that banning “pit bulls” was supposedly “rationally related” to public health, welfare, and safety. Read the rest of this entry »

April 12th, 2011 by Editor

For about 30 years, myths about so-called “pit bulls” (though “pit bull” is not a breed) have been disseminated via hearsay, anecdote, and even the media.  But these myths are just that: stories of invention.  Read the rest of this entry »