(Beth Clifton collage)
Pit bull ban would have been replaced by “one free bite”
WINNIPEG, Manitoba––Rejecting both of the leading pet-keeping fads of the past two decades, both often covers for animal fighting and organized crime, the Winnipeg city council by identical 9-7 votes on April 28, 2022 upheld reputedly the oldest pit bull ban in Canada and squelched a proposal to allow backyard chickens.
The Winnipeg city council majority voted down a recommendation from the standing council policy committee on protection, community services, and parks “to remove the prohibition of specific dog breeds from the Responsible Pet Ownership by-law and replace it with a breed-neutral, behavior-based approach,” reported CTV News editorial producers Katherine Dow and Kayla Rosen.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Pit bull ban introduced in 1990
“The changes would have ended breed-specific legislation first introduced back in 1990 after people were badly injured in attacks,” Dow and Rosen said.
“The breed ban covers pit bulls, Staffordshire bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers and predominant mixes,” Dow and Rosen explained.
Dow and Rosen omitted to mention that the so-called “breed-neutral, behavior-based approach” would have in effect been a “one free bite” law, since it could not be invoked before a pit bull attacked someone.
The ANIMALS 24-7 forty-year breed-specific log of more than 11,350 fatal and disfiguring dog attacks documents that approximately half of the 7,900 pit bull attacks were, according to the pit bull owners, the first known exhibitions of dangerous behavior by the pit bulls who killed or disfigured someone.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Winnipeg Humane Society thinks risk of being barred from “doggy day care” & dog parks might deter pit bull attacks
Transcona city councilor Shawn Nason, “who ran on a platform to end the ban on breed-specific dogs and voted in favor of the changes,” according to Dow and Rosen, joined the Winnipeg Humane Society in pushing a proposal to “regulate [dog] owners’ behaviors with a new ‘at-risk’ category,” said CBC reporter Sam Samson.
“This would flag owners who have recurring behavioral issues with their animals,” Samson continued. “The city does [already] have categories to flag dangerous and exceptionally dangerous pets, but this new category was supposed to be a preventative measure, according to the report” from the standing committee on protection, community services, and parks.
“Anyone who has a pet flagged as ‘at risk’ wouldn’t be allowed to let their dog go to doggy daycare or be in an off-leash area,” Samson detailed earlier, on April 11, 2022.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Full employment for dog trainers
The report also recommended, Samson said, “strengthening the ‘dangerous dog category by making training and harness use mandatory, removing the ability to appeal that label once it’s been handed down, and by giving the city the power to seize, rehome or euthanize any dog whose owner doesn’t follow the rules of that category.”
The city of Winnipeg already has the latter power, while the requirement for training might be seen as a “full employment for dog trainers” measure, chiefly benefitting the trainers who lined up to testify for repealing the pit bull ban.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Mayor wants pit bulls to be an election issue
The Winnipeg pit bull ban “was brought in after a vicious attack on one of our residents,” recalled Winnipeg mayor Brian Bowman, who voted to keep the ban. “I, for one, don’t want to be responsible for increasing the number of pit bulls in the City of Winnipeg.
“We’ve heard at committee from veterinarians,” Bowman continued, “including one who was very clear that a bite from a pit bull is very different than a bite from a Chihuahua. They are different bites.
“Dogs do bite,” Bowman acknowledged, “but the bite from a pit bull can be deadly.”
Bowman, however, recommended that the pit bull ban “should be an upcoming election issue. Civic elections will be held across Manitoba on October 26,” Samson mentioned.
(Beth Clifton collage)
The Colorado experience
Voters in Denver, Colorado in November 2020––influenced by a hugely well-funded campaign by pit bull advocates, without organized opposition from attack victims––repealed a pit bull ban that had stood since 1989.
Voters in neighboring Aurora, Colorado, overwhelmingly voted in November 2014 to keep a pit bull ban passed at the same time as the Denver ban, but the Aurora city council repealed the ban in January 2021.
Three weeks to a day later, five-year-old Leonardo Duran of Aurora suffered the first disfiguring pit bull attack in either Aurora or Denver in more than 30 years, inflicted by only the third pit bull rehomed by the Aurora Animal Shelter since the ban was rescinded.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Study found Winnipeg pit bull ban especially effective in protecting children
A 2012 study published by the Journal of Injury Prevention, entitled “Effectiveness of breed-specific legislation in decreasing the incidence of dog-bite injury hospitalizations in people in the Canadian province of Manitoba,” by Malathi Raghavan, Patricia J Martens, Dan Chateau, and Charles Burchill, found that in “a total of 16 urban and rural jurisdictions with pit bull bans there was a significant reduction in dog bite injury hospitalization rates from the pre-BSL to post-BSL period.”
The study by Raghavan et al further found that in Winnipeg the dog bite injury hospitalization rate dropped to about a third lower than in Brandon, Manitoba, which did not adopt a pit bull ban.
The study also found that banning pit bulls “appeared more effective in protecting those aged fewer than 20 years” than non-breed-specific dog laws.
(Beth Clifton collage.)
Winnipeg pit bull incidents
Pit bulls brought into Winnipeg despite the ban have been involved in several dangerous incidents in recent years.
In January 2021, for example, a purported “service” pit bull was expelled from Winnipeg after four months of hearings and a two-month appeal process.
The pit bull was “accused of roughing-up another animal and disliking Indigenous people,” reported James Snell for the Winnipeg Sun.
That episode erupted four months after an incident at a local motel in which three adult pit bulls and a puppy sent three people, including the owner, to hospitals with injuries that police described as “life-altering.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Concern about avian flu kills backyard chicken coop proposal
After upholding the Winnipeg pit bull ban, the city council majority “voted 9-7 to completely scrap a two-year pilot project to allow backyard chickens,” Samson of the CBC reported. “Many councilors stated their concerns about avian flu in the province.
“The other option,” Samson said, “was to delay the pilot and come back to it in a year.”
The proposal would have authorized backyard chicken coops in 20 locations, after which the Winnipeg city council would have considered making the authorization of backyard chicken coops standard city policy.
(See Will bird flu cut the U.S. appetite for chicken, eggs, ducks, & turkey?)
(Beth Clifton collage)
Winnipeg Humane Society opposed backyard chicken coops
“It would be ill-advised for council to support such a proposal since the outbreak was declared just a few months ago,” said Winnipeg Humane Society spokesperson Brittany Semeniuk.
“Semeniuk also had concerns that Winnipeggers may irresponsibly discard chickens once they no longer can produce eggs,” Samson said. She is also concerned there are a limited amount of veterinarians who can treat chickens within or near Winnipeg.”
(Beth & Merritt Clifton)
Apparently not among the stated concerns of the Winnipeg Humane Society is the frequent use of backyard chicken keeping as a cover for breeding gamefowl to be used in cockfighting.
Concluded Samson, “City staff are asking for one more year to consider changes to which exotic animals are and are not allowed within Winnipeg, and how that bylaw could be changed.”
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Isn’t Winnipeg a little cold for back yard chickens?
Odd that they wanted to allow pits and chickens.
Had those measures gone though it would not have been long before someone came home to a bunch of dead chickens and a bloody pit.
No, Winnipeg is not too cold for back yard chickens. As a child my grandparents lived just a few minutes outside the city limits and had a small chicken coop, I fondly remember going and collecting eggs from it.
I don’t think the pit bulls would be at any greater risk to attack the chickens than german shepherds or many other dog breeds. One of my family members had a West Highland Terrier that couldn’t be taken to a relative’s house because it would attack the cat. Although honestly I think a much greater risk to the chickens would be the coyotes. Yes we have those, yes they do roam around the streets in some areas.
Again Annette Easton offers anecdote instead of evidence. Indeed chickens (and ducks and geese) can be kept in very cold climates, as I saw during my many years on rural news beats in Quebec, but traditionally in barns warmed by the body heat of large herds of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses, and more recently by the use of heat lamps. A small flock without a heat source, unable to fly south as do wild birds, will freeze to death.
German shepherds on occasion have killed dozens of chickens. Pit bulls, on the other hand, have killed an average of around 10,000 chickens per year in the U.S. alone over the nine years that ANIMALS 24-7 has tracked the data. See How many other animals did dogs––& pit bulls––kill in 2021?
I was attacked and dragged through a yard as a child by a German shepherd. Decades later a family member had a German shepherd that consistently bit people (including me) drawing blood and leaving scars. German shepherds are one of the popular dog breeds.
I know many people who own pit bulls and have had zero issues with them. They’ve been loving, adorable, goofy dogs. I’ve never felt afraid of or been threatened by a pit bull. A breed-specific ban is idiotic. Ban the behaviour, ban the owners, but don’t ban the breed.
Also, your implication that people want the ban lifted (and chickens allowed) as “covers for animal fighting and organized crime” is… staggering. Yes those activities do occur some places, and no pit bulls are not the only dogs that are used for them. Everyone here that I know who wants the ban lifted (including me) wants to have these dogs as pets. Everyone I know that wants to have chickens (including me) wants to be able to have them either strictly as pets or as a combination pet/egg source.
Annette Easton’s comment, above, is a blatant example of putting anecdote ahead of evidence and ignorance ahead of easily accessible information.
Yes, German shepherds are about four times more dangerous than the average dog; but German shepherds over the past 40 years have outnumbered pit bulls in the U.S. and Canada by about two-to-one, are still almost as numerous as pit bulls, and though ranking third among dog breed types in fatal and disfiguring attacks on humans over that time, German shepherds and all of their mixes combined have killed 37 people, disfiguring 230, while pit bulls have killed 568, disfiguring nearly 5,400. There is really no rational comparison.
Further, as already pointed out, “ban the behavior, ban the owners” does not address the reality that about half of all fatal and disfiguring pit bull attacks are the first known violent incident involving the pit bulls in question.
Finally, Annette Easton appears to be extraordinarily oblivious to the reality that both dogfighting and cockfighting exploded to unprecedented levels of activity, as measured by arrests, following the vogue for lifting pit bull and backyard chicken-keeping bans that began midway through the first decade of this century. Despite the law enforcement indifference to interdicting and prosecuting cockfighting in much of the U.S. demonstrated by the work of Showing Animals Respect & Kindness and the Humane Farming Association, cockfighting remains the single most commonly prosecuted form of animal cruelty in the U.S., well ahead of prosecutions of acts of cruelty and neglect to dogs, cats, and horses.
Thanking you, Merritt and Beth, for continuing to provide factual evidence of the need for BSL, and for furnishing statistics on WHY.
Our flock of chickens in the high desert, where there were freezes and significant snows, had two enclosed barns with nest boxes lined with wood shavings. This enabled them to shelter out of the elements. Keeping chickens in a rural envionment with safe shelter is one thing; subjecting them to extreme temperatures and the public to possible serious illness is quite another.
Good call on both issues, Winnipeg.
The average daily low temperature for the month of January in the California high desert is 44 degrees Fahrenheit, with a high of 68 degrees Fahrenheit. In Winnipeg the average daily low temperature is zero degrees Fahrenheit, with a high of 14 degrees Fahreneheit.
Winnipeg also gets more snow in any given three to ten days of January than the California high desert gets all month.
All of which means that while the California high desert does get some days that resemble Winnipeg, those would be good days in Winnipeg, where cooped chickens would experience those temperatures and worse every day, with markedly more wind chill.