In the era of individual rights, banning anything is portrayed as a restriction on personal freedom.
That's why outgoing Liberal MLA Terry Lake's bid to ban cigarettes in B.C. for anyone under 21 years old sounds so old-fashioned. The conventional wisdom states that if people want to poison themselves, that's their right, so long as they are nowhere near the majority of non-smokers who consider it their right to breathe air unpolluted by the foul stench of cigarettes.
Not only do government bans on any product, from heroin and cocaine, to automatic weapons and pit bull terriers, never work, they actually create a lucrative black market that endangers the public with underground smuggling and increased gang activity.
Government nudges, however, have a much better track record. Take smoking. Eliminating smoking is an unreasonable goal but reducing it, particularly among young people, is possible. Nudging works best with other nudges, which is why restricting smoking to outdoors, only a certain distance from building entrances, financial incentives to quit, while keeping the cost of cigarettes high and covering the packaging with health warnings and gross pictures of blackened lungs all work together to both deter new smokers and encourage longtime smokers to kick the habit.
Alone, none of these nudges make much of a difference and are not seen as an unreasonable hardship (well, except the cost) but together, they apply both a steady push on smokers to change their ways. Most of all, these nudges provide the social license for non-smokers to encourage/harass their friends and family members to butt out.
Rather than a ban on bull terrier breeds, Prince George tried nudging dog owners to avoid these breeds with a hefty licensing fee, a substantial fine for impoundment and a requirement that the dogs were muzzled when out in public.
The problem is that few people, including bylaw officers, can tell the difference American pitbull terriers, Staffordshire bull terriers and American Staffordshire bull terriers, never mind cross breeds. It's the equivalent of allowing smoking but not letting anyone spark up a Marlboro.
And as city staff found out, the number of reported bites on residents by those so-called problem breeds actually increased in the five years since the rules were changed. The nudges aren't working.
Outright banning the breeds won't work (and the B.C. SPCA also opposes it), either.
What might be more effective is to target behaviour, not breed. Any kind of dog that bites a stranger in a public place - that is, anywhere outside of the dog's home property - is a problem and so is its owners, who are not taking adequate care of their pet.
This way, the breed is irrelevant and the only question to answer is whether the dog bite complaint is legitimate.
If it is, the city then has to decide on an adequate penalty and there is a simple way to go forward here as well. A second offence is automatic euthanasia for the dog, regardless of the severity of the bite. Euthanasia would also be automatic for a first-offence bite that required professional medical attention. The cost, along with any additional fine, would be passed on to the property owner at tax time, meaning landlords would either have to restrict tenants from owning dogs or require tenants to pay a pet deposit with the lease.
A minor first offence could come with a fine and/or enrolment in obedience training. The dog owner could have the fine returned to them by presenting a receipt to city hall within six months of the incident that proved the dog has successfully completed such training. As anyone who's have watched Cesar Melan on TV knows, obedience school for dogs is about educating the owner as much as it is socializing the animal.
The vast majority of dog owners love their pet and consider their pooch a member of the family, whether it's a pit bull or a poodle. Nudging owners to take better control of their dogs and holding them accountable when they don't would be safer for the public than slapping muzzles on individual breeds. For the few people that want to own a pit bull, they're free to do so but they accept both the personal risk and the potential consequences, just as the decreasing amount of smokers do.
