Ineffective laws set neighbor against neighbor, discriminate against responsible owners, create unsolvable enforcement problems for animal control officers, waste precious public resources, and do not address problematic owner behavior.

Bill Bruce, advisor to NCRC, and Director of Animal and By-Law Services in Calgary, Alberta, discusses ineffective laws in this video interview.

NCRC Interview with Bill Bruce on Ineffective Dog Laws.

Over and under-inclusive. If a dog owner complies with the standards set forth in his community, how many dogs he/she has, or what kind of dogs he/she has, should not be public business. Ineffective laws penalize responsible dog owners while failing to isolate the problematic ones. For example, in a community that limits owners to three dogs in an effort to control nuisance and other issues, a responsible pet owner with five dogs, who does not create a nuisance or threat to neighbors may face a loss of one or more of his companions. A limit law does not address the irresponsible owners who, however many dogs they have, leave them out at night barking, allow them to damage neighbors' property, or worse, allow them to threaten other animals or people.

Difficult to enforce. How can animal control officers know when responsible pet owners are in violation of a limit law, breed-specific law, a time-limit tethering ordinance, or a mandatory spay/neuter law? They can't -- unless they patrol door-to-door looking for violators, which, in the case of a timed time-limit tethering ordinance means making a second stop after the expiration of the time limit. All this is timely, costly, and just not practical. Breed-specific legislation is especially difficult to enforce because it is impossible, even for animal professionals, to breed label dogs of unknown origin.

Costly. Ineffective laws waste precious public resources. Laws that target a breed of dog not only waste currently budgeted resources, but demand additional appropriations. Best Friends Animal Society developed a fiscal impact calculator that allows communities to estimate the cost of attempting to enforce breed-specific legislation. A recent study shows why the expense related to enforcing ineffective breed-specific legislation does not produce the desired result of reducing serious dog bite-related injuries. Click here to read about this study. In addition to the taxpayer expense, ineffective, discriminatory laws are costly to individual dog owners, who may be confronted with the high emotional cost of having their family pet taken from them and destroyed. Or they may bear ordinance-imposed financial costs as a result of a requirement that they maintain higher liability insurance limits, or purchase expensive containment systems. Finally, because ineffective laws lower license compliance, communities also lose licensing revenues that could have been used to fund important animal services.

Alienate pet owners from each other and from the community. Ineffective laws set one group of pet owners against other groups of pet owners. Responsible pet owners who may be over the limit law, who own a breed or breed mix targeted by breed-specific legislation, or who have an intact pet in an area with a mandatory spay-neuter law, will be less likely to license pets and less likely to take pets to the vet for fear of facing stiff fines or worse: having their pets taken from them and destroyed. The resulting impact to communities is a loss of licensing revenue, and an increased threat to public health for animals that do not receive vaccines that prevent the spread of disease in the community.

Good, effective animal control ordinances clearly describe the standard of behavior the community has agreed is fair and reasonable, and which it expects all pet owners to meet. 

Breed specific laws (also called breed discriminatory laws), in addition to the kinds of problems described above, do not produce the intended result, which is a reduction in dog-bite injuries. For more on this important topic read:

Dog Breed Specific Regulation by Jane Berkey

New Study Explains Why BSL Does Not Reduce Dog Bites

Banned Breeds Are No More Aggressive Than Others, New Study Finds

Denver: Selective Counting and the Cost to Dogs and People

Miami-Dade County: No Positive Results

Sioux City Breed Ban Misses the Mark

World-Wide Failure of Breed-Specific Legislation

How Data Can Spare Dogs and Reduce Dog Bites by Dr. Karen Overall, Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Psychiatry Department – Penn Med

Speak! or Rollover! The Choice Dog Owners Need to Make, by Karen Delise, American Dog Magazine (2009).

Aggression and Dogs: No significant difference found between breeds.