VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 08:31:35 03/07/02 Thu
Author: Emily
Subject: strategic advise on BSL

[permission to x-post] This message was written by Laurel Barrick

For what it's worth, it is hard to speak against anything unless you also have a better solution in hand.

We do have serious, long standing, unaddressed problems with irresponsible owners, lack of animal control staffing, dog fighting, a lack of public education for owners and potential victims of dog bites, etc. here in Kent County, Michigan.

Our approach has been to bring the AVMA's "Community Approach to Bite Prevention" to the attention of the public and the officials. To that, we've added our own 11 suggested activities that should be included in such a plan, as a start, locally. We are the "Community Bite Prevention Committee". True, we are against BSL and any new laws until the old ones can be enforced, but we are for, much more.

You will find the AVMA's plan at
http://www.avma.org/ as well as their press release explaining why the AVMA is opposed to BSL.

The National Animal Control Association, AKC, UKC, American Pet Dog Trainers Association, the HSUS, ADOA, etc. all
have position statements speaking to the inadvisability of BSL.

Our committee, in the beginning, had not a single pitbull or staffy owner on it. We came to this as citizens with multiple dogs (dog limits were part of the bsl proponets package), trainers, rescues and one local ADOA member. Kennel Club members, veternarians, owners of some of the breeds most often effected by BSL, etc. have since joined us, but we started out with a core of people who knew there really were problems confronting residents of neighborhoods like mine and also knew that banning any one breed would not solve anything.

From the community's standpoint, if they realized it, the worst thing about BSL is that it does not work.

The average person only wants their family and their own pets to be safe. Compounded by a lack of information on the
comprehensive nature of the real problems and real solutions and that whole batch of wivestales regarding Pitbulls, these people are ready to support anything that seems to offer them some quick results.

Our goal has been to redefine the issue for them. Instead of Pitbulls vs the Public, we need to underscore the reality of a situation where any dog can be a problem if the people involved are irresponsible, use their dogs inappropriately or through ignorance, create a dangerous dog and unleash it on their familes and neighbors.

It is too soon to know how we're doing here. We have a petition drive going on in opposition to BLS or any other new limits / restrictions for responsible owners and supporting the AVMA's approach and our own 11 suggestions.

We held a press conference last week, with a live parade of the "Top Ten Biting Dogs" (based on local stats in this county) to launch the petition drive and announce a meeting we held for concerned dog owners and officals last Thursday.

The press conference gave the media some good visuals, exposed the fact that many different breeds bite and dangerous dogs are made, not born, by stupid, irresponsible people and allowed for a discussion of statistics and the popularity of the various breeds as reflected in those stats, not the viciousness of any of those breeds.

With a trainer on hand to explain the people element of the problem and myself tackling the definition of the problem, (the complex and varied nature of the real problems that won't be addressed by bandaides), we were able to announce our agenda as well as brief the media in more detail than we could have if they were only covering some event, such as a
commission meeting or public meeting.

I don't usually like press conferences as a means to approach the media, but in this case, a well timed one with good visuals and local experts that the media couldn't readily get all in one place any where else and staged at a time of day when none of them were right on deadline, I think it did help. A press conference has to work for the media if it is to be successful. The fact that you need them won't get them there.

Hopefully, it also started owners of some other breeds thinking about whose dog might be banned next.

At the meeting on Thursday, we presented a panel that included Dr. Stinson, legislative director of the MI Purebred Dog Association and board member of the ADOA, talking about why BLS doesn't work, how difficult it is to enforce and how it backfires on communities.

Part way through his talk, to illustrate enforcement problems inherent in BSL, we did a live version of the Find the Pitbull game, (online original version http://members.aol.com/radogz/find.html ) using some of the many breeds often mistaken for Pitbulls and inviting the audience to pick out the pitbull.

We didn't put any commissioners or AC on the spot by asking them for their answers publicly, but I daresay when the real
Pitbull was brought out, there were some surprises.

My only regret is that we did not have several Pitbulls representing the various ways purebred Pitbulls can look when we brought out the "Real McCoy".

The rest of the panel included a veternarian speaking to the mythology of the alleged supernatural powers of the Pitbull, the popularity of the breed locally as witnessed by the numbers seen by local vets and introducing the AVMA approach, our local director of Animal Control talked about current laws and their lack of enforcement due to staffing shortages, a certified Master Instructor from the APDT talking about how humans create dangerous dogs out of any and all breeds, a woman who had served on an Animal Shelter Advisory Committee that had studied enforcement problems and a neighborhood resident speaking about the dog fighting problem and lack of a police response as it relates to our problems on the streets.

If we'd had more time, the meeting would probably have been marketed to concerned citizens instead of just "concerned dog owners" and officials, but the need was to get our definition of the problems and solutions in front of the public (via the media) and officials, launch the petition drive, etc., without anyone being treated to a hysterical debate between "victims and pitbull owners".

Now we are into the signature gathering stage and small meetings with city and county commissioners, meetings with
constituents from the various city wards and districts.

Owners of the breeds most often effected by bans definetly have a role to play in doing PR for their breed in any fight against BSL, but my sense is that if only pitbull and staffy owners come out, the issue gets "cut" in such a way as it does not have the credibility it needs with the public.

The more neutral and professional expertise of trainers, veternarians, animal control officers and anyone else who has studied the local problems will hopefully carry more weight with the public and elected officials.

Anyway, this is where we're at after having started out playing catch up after a local neighborhood association held their meeting to ban pitbulls on Jan. 29th, following an attack on a school child last December.

Watching as city after city enacts these bans, my thought is that people shouldn't wait until some headline launches the city towards BSL. Some of us tackled a more limited version of the problem twelve years ago, when pitbulls, then fairly new to this area, in the hands of stupid kids, first began to cause problems. The dog fighting, at the street level, was the main issue then. It wasn't something we had seen before, they were using our pets to train their dogs on and beginning, in some cases, to use Pitbulls as weapons....to mug paperboys, etc. Fighting, as we learned, had been in the county for 30 years or more, but
Pitbulls in street corner and playground fights and the whole surging popularity of the breed as America's Macho Dog, was all new to us. This is a conservative area and usually about five to ten years behind the coasts in any kind of trend.

We really got no where with the police who wouldn't work with Animal Control to tackle the fighting. The media coverage, more than anything else, got the kids off the streets for a while and that was about all we accomplished in the late 80's.

We were neighborhoood associations....we didn't even know about breed bans and pitbulls were just gaining popularity here then, (our area is pretty conservative and behind the times) so we didn't know much about them either.

But, when the pitbull owners came out in droves to speak against bans (their assumption was that was where we were
headed) and we looked into those, we studied places like Cincinnati, researched the breed and concluded that bans didn't make any sense and solved nothing.

If we had kept going then, if we had looked at the whole picture of strays, abuse, neglect, the lack of enforcement, ignorance, etc. all the elements and situations that put residents at risk from irresponsible owners who create dangerous dogs and dangerous situations, we might not be in the position we are today.

And hindsight being what it is, I guess my suggestion to those folks in places where breed bans are currently on the horizon is to try and get the issue redefined for your residents and refocus it on bite prevention. There is no guarantee that it is going to work here, but for the life of me, I can't think of any better way to fight it and get the real solutions we need.

But more significantly, for all of you in places where breed bans are not currently being proposed, get started now on researching your local problems and working for solutions that will help prevent the kind of headlines that will, sooner or later, bring this issue to your doorstep.

Establish yourselves now, not as owners of any one breed, but as concerned citizens who are willing to tackle animal control problems for the benefit of the community.

Breed bans, like dog bites in general, have to be a whole lot easier to prevent than they are to respond to once they get introduced.

Serve the ball, rather than waiting for it to be dropped in your court.

If only we had done that years ago.....

Laurel Barrick
Grand Rapids, MI

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.