This Town’s Plan to Take Away a Disabled Girl’s Dog Shows Everything That is Wrong with Busybody Government

12/3/2014

Imagine if a bunch of government busybodies decided that they had the right to take away and kill your beloved dog, even though the dog had not attacked anyone, or ever shown any aggressive tendencies. For one family in Moreauville, Louisiana, this isn’t just a cautionary tale of government overreach — it’s reality.

The Moreauville city council voted to ban all Rottweiler and Pit Bull dogs from their city by December 1. The ban was supposedly needed because a handful of residents complained that several dogs of this type were running loose throughout town, though there aren’t any records of them actually attacking anyone.

… Not only were Rottweilers and Pit Bulls banned from the town, but any of these dogs already living there had to be gotten rid of. Owners who didn’t rehome their dogs—completely regardless of the dogs’ history of behavior—would have their pets taken by force and killed.

… While Rottweilers and Pits are indeed bred to be muscular, active dogs, they are no more inherently mean than any other dog (as anyone who has encountered an undisciplined Chihuahua biting their ankles well knows). Yes, an aggressive Pit Bull can do more damage than an aggressive Chihuahua, but so can an aggressive Labrador—and no one is suggesting we ban Labs. With any of breed, it is the owners who determine the dog’s behavior far more than genetics—and indeed research has demonstrated that breed-specific laws like the one in Moreauville do not result in decreased dog bite incidents.

It’s also frankly none of the government’s business what kind of dogs we own. To ban all dogs which look a certain way is a bizarre expansion of big government which is expensive and nearly impossible to enforce. Indeed, to preemptively incriminate animals before they’ve actually harmed anyone arguably sets a dangerous precedent of policing tendencies and intentions rather than actual crimes.

… In this case, they take the form of a dog named Zeus, a Pit Bull owned by a girl named O’Hara Owens, whose neck problems require her to wear a brace and use a wheelchair. Zeus has never been accused of any aggressive behavior, and he’s a huge comfort to O’Hara.

“If anything ever happened to him, I would just shut down,” she says, because Zeus is her soon-to-be official therapy dog. “I can sit here if I’m in pain, he comes and he notices it before I even make any noise.”

O’Hara’s parents have been fighting Moreauville’s government to keep their beloved pet alive and in their family, insisting they will not rehome the dog or surrender him to be killed. Thanks to an avalanche of media coverage leading to more than 300,000 petition signatures in Zeus’ defense, it looks like the Moreauville ban may indeed be overturned and Zeus will be saved.

So government busybodies would literally take away a disabled girl’s beloved dog, soon to be therapy dog, because some busybodies in her town didn’t like the breed — even though no attacks by the breed have been reported. It’s pointless legislation that isn’t remotely based in fact, and does nothing except devastate families who love these dogs… in short, it’s everything bad about the government wrapped up in one ridiculous law.

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