PB law has pit-bull owners hunting insurance reprieve
Posted on Saturday, July 29, 2006
PINE BLUFF — As the death toll for pit bulls mounts in Pine Bluff, dog owners anxious to save their pets from lethal injection are scrambling to find a liability policy for an animal that few insurance agents want to cover.
Animal Control has euthanized 85 pit bulls since June 16, when a new city law took effect requiring minimum $ 100, 000 insurance policies to cover dog attacks. An additional 26 have been banished from the city. A handful of pit-bull owners have insured their dogs, and others seek the requisite coverage for a breed revered for its courage but reviled for its bite.
The City Council adopted the ordinance by unanimous vote May 16. The law classifies as a “dangerous dog” the American Pit Bull Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, American Bulldog and any dog conforming substantially to the breed of American Pit Bull Terrier. It exempts show dogs and service dogs.
Besides carrying the insurance, pit-bull owners must register their dogs with Animal Control, which also entails having them spayed or neutered and marked with a tattoo ID. No one younger than 21 can handle a pit bull in public, and pit bulls cannot be kept on chains in backyards.
While noncompliance means modest fines and penalties for the owners, the dogs face death.
“There’s grown men calling me, crying, saying they’re about to kill my dog if I don’t find insurance,” said Mike Waymack, a broker with Best Quote Insur- ance Agency in Pine Bluff.
Waymack said he looked for more than a month before finding an underwriter that offers a pit-bull policy.
“I found one company, and I do mean one,” Waymack said.
Premiums f igure to run roughly $ 500 per year, or more, per dog, he said.
The underwriter, Evolution Insurance Brokers of Salt Lake City, says on its Web site that it specializes in “coverage for hardto-place risks on many domestic and exotic creatures and is especially valuable for homeowners who have experienced difficulty in obtaining animal liability coverage.” Calls seeking further information were not returned.
One pit-bull owner in Pine Bluff who intends to comply with the ordinance said he’ll do whatever it takes to keep Dakota, his year-old pit-bull mix.
“We’ll have to comply,” said Larry Kirklin, owner of Larry Kirklin Photography and Tux Center. “But it’s sad that they picked out a certain breed of dog. We’re not going to get rid of her.”
Kirklin said Dakota guards his southeast Pine Bluff home when he and his family are gone and protects family members when they’re home.
“What I like about her is that I feel safe,” Kirklin said. “We never taught her to be a fighter.”
While insurance costs have some fearing for the lives of their dogs, DeLoyd Cleveland, the city Animal Control director, said the ordinance will help curb a population of dangerous dogs that had ballooned to perhaps more than 1, 000.
“Pine Bluff had become a breeding ground and a manufactory for pit bulls,” Cleveland said. “There’s no doubt the ordinance will reduce the number of pit bulls here.”
The ordinance was complaint-driven, as is its enforcement. Seized dogs are given a lethal injection and are then cremated if their owners fail to comply with the ordinance after five business days. If Animal Control has to euthanize a lot of dogs in a short period of time, the carcasses are dumped at the Jefferson County Landfill, Cleveland said.
North Little Rock faced a similar pit-bull problem leading to City Council approval of a ban on the breed in November 2004.
“It was the best thing we ever did,” Animal Control director Billy Grace said. “It was totally out of control — the breeding and the fighting.”
In 2005, the first full year of the ban, North Little Rock seized 402 pit bulls and euthanized 321.
“Life’s better now,” Grace said.
A critic of breed-specific bans, Karen Delise, author of Fatal Dog Attacks, said laws such as those passed in Pine Bluff and North Little Rock are misguided.
“Breed-specific legislation doesn’t solve anything,” she said. “The behavior that drives these dogs is the behavior of the owners. A negative image attracts negative owners.”
A common sight in Pine Bluff is several youngsters walking down the street with pit bulls tied to ropes or chains. These dogs, Delise said, are nothing more than status symbols for their irresponsible owners.
But Grace said the only sensible solution is to take the animals off the streets, regardless of how or why the pit bull achieved its status-symbol standing and no matter who is to blame for the dogs being menaces.
“You can’t just sit around and do nothing,” he said.
Unlike many cities across the United States, Pine Bluff did not pass a pit-bull ordinance in response to an attack, as was the case in McGehee, a Delta neighbor to the southeast. Pine Bluff Alderman Derwood Smith proposed the law to control what he saw as an increasingly dangerous and lawless situation.
“It’s for safety reasons,” Smith said. “I’ve seen them fighting at the carwash across the street [from his service station at 13 th Avenue and Cherry Street ]... dogs next-door are killing other dogs.”
Smith said he hoped the insurance requirement, in addition to the other restrictions, will persuade many pit-bull owners to turn in their dogs to Animal Control. In at least 38 cases, that’s what happened, Cleveland said. Other dogs have been picked up on the street or taken from residences in response to complaints.
Dog bans of some type exist in 37 states, across Europe, in South America and in the Caribbean, according to Jan Cooper, a longtime advocate of allowing pet owners to own the breed of their choice. A professed enthusiast of the Rottweiler, which is banned or restricted in many places, Cooper maintains a Web site listing breed-specific legislation at www. rott-n-chatter. com.
This year, the American Kennel Club, which opposes breedspecific bans, has tracked 76 initiatives that have either been or are about to be implemented. In 2005, the club tracked 105 initiatives.
“It’s on the rise,” club spokesman Lisa Peterson said.
The dogs labeled as dangerous in Pine Bluff and elsewhere share a common ancestry with the bull-baiting and pit-fighting terriers of England, which outlawed both practices in the 19 th century, Peterson said.
Though it is unclear how many legal bans nationwide require liability policies, forcing homeowners to insure their dogs is nothing new. The New York-based Insurance Information Institute estimates that dog bites cost insurers more than $ 317 million in 2005 — making agents wary of writing a policy for a homeowner who keeps a pit bull, a German Shepherd, a Doberman Pinscher or a Rottweiler in their home or yard.
Agents like Brent Terrell of R&T Insurance in Pine Bluff have written home insurance policies for people who have pets considered dangerous or vicious, but only if they waive liability for any injuries their dogs might cause.
“Just because a guy wants an insurance policy doesn’t mean the dog is a good risk,” Terrell said.
He posed a theoretical claim: A pit bull injures a neighbor’s child. The insurance pays for the medical expenses. But the case ends up in civil court, where the injured party claims “mental anguish” and a lifelong fear of dogs, and wins the case.
“When a dog bites someone, it usually takes the whole policy,” Terrell said.
While the venture is risky, he said it’s not impossible to find an agent who will assume that risk.
“It’s not something that’ll be easy to find, and it’ll be expensive,” he said.
The Kennel Club, the Humane Society of the United States and other critics of breedspecific bans say that once pit bulls are taken off the streets, the people who breed them will adopt a new dog — perhaps such fighting breeds as the Dogue de Bordeaux, the Presa Canario, the Japanese Tosa or the Dogo Argentino.
But Cleveland was skeptical.
“I don’t think anything will replace the pit,” he said.
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