Hooray! Yet another city has ended its unfair Pit Bull ban.
The City Council of Overland Park, Kansas, voted unanimously Monday night to stop punishing certain dogs based solely on their looks or the breed(s) they happen to be. Overland Park was the last city in the Kansas City metro area to continue practicing breed-specific legislation (BSL), which are unfair laws, including breed bans, that single out certain dogs.
The city council voted to remove any language that specifies Staffordshire Bull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers and American Pit Bull Terriers from its dangerous animal ordinance, as in the following example (yay!):
BSL has proven to be ineffective in accomplishing what it’s intended to do — increasing public safety — wherever it’s been enacted. It’s also very expensive to enforce. It’s also opposed by nearly every major animal welfare organization, including the ASPCA, AVMA, HSUS, etc.
Those are some very good reasons why there’s been a growing trend to end BSL around the country.
Prairie Village, another city in the Kansas City metro area, lifted its Pit Bull ban in February 2020.
In November 2020, Denver, which had one of the most notorious Pit Bull bans in the world, ended its 31-year ban, thanks to voters. Two months later, the city council of Aurora, the third-largest city in Colorado, decided to end its 15-year Pit Bull ban as well. And soon after that, Commerce City, Colo., also ended its Pit Bull ban.
Thank you, Overland Park City Council, for having the good wisdom to judge the deed, not the breed.
Photo: Those were my first two Pitties, Sophie and Larry, enjoying a mind meld back in the late 1990s.