Of course we all want to keep ourselves and our families safe from dangerous dogs but banning breeds is not the way to do it. Any Breed on their own is not necessarily any more dangerous then another. Breeds become dangerous when the environment they grow up in teaches them to become dangerous and on top of that doesn’t socialize them from a young age with people and other dogs. These dangerous dogs never learn how to interact properly. Many of the dogs on the banned list or dangerous lists in cities around the world have very powerful jaws and are very stubborn so once they lock onto something they don’t give in easily. Add that to the fact that these same dogs are kept by people who want to appear tougher and actually train their dogs to be more aggressive and you have the recipe for utter disaster.
Having Breed Specific Legislation in Miami Dade County where we live did not protect Davinia from being viciously attacked the dogs in question are not on the list. BSL doesn’t work because there will always be another breed that can be taught to be mean and bred by unscrupulous people to be more powerful and stronger then their current breed standard. The better option by far is to go into schools and start teaching children early about dog safety and how to care for dogs to teach that dog fighting is a despicable event and it is not funny to watch two dogs attempting to kill each other. Once the children are educated they will bring that knowledge home to their families and where even more education can be passed along.
Even if you want to use the argument that there are some dogs that just can’t be socialized and brought up as family pets the answer is not to ban them. Banning a single breed leads to a very slippery slope and soon your breed of choice will be on the table for consideration to be banned. Don’t believe me? Just look at Denmark where they already have a BSL list of 13 dogs with another 12 on the watch list for potential inclusion to the list in 2013. It is not obvious (as in dog bite statistics or numbers of the breed in the country) as to why the original 13 breeds were put on the list in the first place. Some of which exists in such small numbers in Denmark as to not even be a concern of any kind they could only be found if imported from other countries and I might be overly generalizing here but if you are going to spend the money to import a dog to get a prized specimen of your breed of choice you are not going to raise it to fight you are going to show it off to everyone so they can see how beautiful the dog is.
Here is the new watch list from the Denmark Ministry of Justice has now issued a breed “watchlist” that comprises an additional 12 breeds of dogs:
Anatolian Shepherd Dog
Bull Mastiff
Cane Corso
Cao Fila de Sao Miguel (Sao Miguel Cattle Dog)
Dogo Canario (Presa Canario)
Iberisk dogge (Danish term–unknown what breed this is)
Maremma Sheepdog
Mastin Espanol (Spanish Mastiff)
Mastin Napoletano (Neapolitan Mastiff)
Polski Owczarek Podhalanski (Polish Tatra Sheepdog)
Rottweiler
Staffordshire Bull Terrier
To learn more about what is going on in Denmark jump on over to BlogPaws and read a first hand report. http://www.blogpaws.com/2011/06/denmarks-breed-ban-frenzy.html
