The hard work of dog fanciers in Jackson Mississippi paid off last week when the city council there rejected an ordinance that targeted specific breeds and adopted a dangerous dog law instead.

On April 18, 2006, the Board of Alderman in Richard, Mississippi passed a ban on Pit Bulls. The ban included not only American Pit Bull Terriers but also Staffordshire Bull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers and related breeds effective June 1, 2006.

This event triggered consideration of a Pit Bull ban in the neighboring city of Jackson, the capitol of Mississippi. By the middle of May, a proposal for stricter regulations against Pit Bulls emerged and quickly expanded to include the top 25 breeds listed on the Center for Disease Control’s list of dogs involved in fatal attacks, which includes Collies, Coonhounds, Great Danes, Mastiffs, Labrador retrievers, mixed breeds, and others.1

But the local kennel clubs, Mississippi State Kennel Club and Brandon Kennel Club of Mississippi were alert and organized immediately to prevent passage of a breed specific ordinance. They sent letters opposing BSL to the mayor and city council. They contacted several organizations including the AKC and the Collie Club of America and received advice and model ordinances which they utilized. Local kennel club member, Noel P. Guiffrida, Esquire, spoke to the city council on behalf of the two local clubs on June 26, 2006 and the council voted to pass a non breed specific dangerous dog ordinance the following day!

The kennel club members thank everyone for their help, and we at NAIA thank them for being on the stick and providing such a good example to the rest of the country.

1. Although the CDC’s oft quoted report on fatal dog attacks provides useful information to help laymen interpret their data properly, lawmakers rebounding from gruesome dog attacks often accept the list at face value, using it to identify and regulate ownership of dogs by specific breeds. They assume that breed number one is the most dangerous; breed number two is second most dangerous, etc. But that is not how CDC interprets its own data. First of all they acknowledge that the methods used for identifying breeds include reports from newspapers, some gleaned from HSUS files, from shelter personnel with little experience in breed identification and owner reports. In addition, the report does not contain denominator information. This is critically important because it means that breed popularity, i.e., the relative number of dogs in a given population is not taken into account, only the number of attacks. Thus, a breed with 600 individuals in a given pool credited with attacking 3 times, might appear more dangerous than a breed with 5 representatives credited with 2 attacks.

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