Last night, Lee's Summit passed the changes to their Dangerous Dog Ordinance. The city decided to look at their dangerous dog ordinance in June of 2006 (oh, yeah, that's right, 16 months ago) following the attack on Alan Hill of Independence. At the time, the goal was to pass a ban on pit bulls, but thanks to the persistence (and ability to listen) of several city council members the idea of BSL was overturned.
The process has taken 16 months. It's consisted of 16 meetings (to my best count) and had 3 committees and the full council discuss. It started in the Community Development committee, then went to full council as a split vote 2-2. At that time, it was kicked to the mayor's appointed public safety advisory board. Most of those gentlemen were for BSL at the initial hearing, but all took the time to learn about the issues, some meeting dogs, going to people's homes, doing research on the internet, going to shelters, etc. At a vote of 12-0, they told the full council that BSL was not the answer.
The Council then split their vote and wrote a couple of ordinances that went to a smaller committee of council members -- which came back with the current ordinance that passed last night at a vote of 6-1. Randall Rhodes, who has long been against any changes to the ordinance was the lone desenting voice.
The "funny" thing about the whole process is that Lee's Summit never had a dog bite problem to begin with as they already had a good DDO.
There are some parts of the ordinance that I like. They have passed some tethering restrictions to prevent 24-hour tethering -- I think they netted out that you could only tether your dog for 30 minutes at a time, for up to 3 hours a day.
Unfortunately, they also passed Mandatory Spay/Neuter for all dogs at 6 months of age. They allowed for some acceptions to the MSN for registered breeders, and licensed therapy or show dogs. And then, made increases in all licensing fees and a significant differential in licensing fees for unaltered dogs.
Two bad things about the ordinance. I think that first of all, they should have just done some differential licensing fees to encourage people to spay/neuter their dogs but not mandate it. Meanwhile, my personal opinion is that all of the licensing fees are too high (especially for unaltered dogs) and will actually discourage people from licensing their dogs....which is exactly what you don't want to have happen.
Lee's Summit fell into a trap of looking at statistics, and not realizing that correlation does not equal causation. One study, by the National Canine Research Foundation, which has very accurate numbers when it comes to canine bites, showed that during a 6 year time period, 92% of all fatal dog attacks were by non-altered dogs.
While there is clearly correlation between fatal dog attacks and unatlered dogs, one has to ask, is the act of being unaltered a cause of these attacks?. While I do think there may be some causation (testosterone, dogs being in heat and more eager to get out of fencing), the reality is that irresponsible dog owners are much less likely to alter their dogs. So if the vast majority of irresponsible dog owners don't alter their dogs, and the vast majority of deadly dog attacks are because owners are irresponsible, then it makes sense that most lethal dogs are unaltered.
This isn't to say that everyone who doesn't alter their dog is a bad owner, but only that most altered dogs have at least fairly responsible owners...proven by the fact they've spent enough effort/money on their dogs to actually get them altered.
I'm still not convinced that there is more than just a very little causation between an unaltered dog and a deadly attack (although there is clear correlation). I don't think that Lee's Summit's law will really do anything other than decrease their licensing rates (remember, they had no dog bite problem in the first place). And I'm glad that at least the responsible owners and show people down there have their outs. But it's just another case where the desire to do something got in the way of realizing that their existing ordinance was really quite good.
At least after 16 long months of discussion, it's over. For now.
Im just glad that they didnt ban pit bulls!
Im tired of hearing all these towns I grew up around banning them!
Posted by: morgan | September 23, 2007 at 06:57 PM