GROSSE POINTE SHORES, Mich. — Pit bulls are now banned in Grosse Pointe Shores near Detroit after the city council narrowly approved the ban on Tuesday with a 4-3 vote. The ban comes after a loose pit bull allegedly attacked another dog and its owners in June.
The ordinance does include exceptions for licensed pit bulls currently residing within city limits.
Grosse Pointe Shores now joins dozens of other Michigan communities that have enacted similar blanket bans on the breed.
As overcrowding in Michigan animal shelters reaches crisis levels, advocates railed against the new rule Friday.
“We should be looking at every single individual dog,” said Kim Alboum of the Bissell Pet Foundation. “We can't make these generalizations.”
Alboum described the stigma against pit bulls as generally inaccurate.
“People who say that these dogs are bred to be aggressive, that's absolutely not true,” Alboum said. “They are wonderful dogs. They're America's family dog. They're one of the most popular dogs in the country.”
She said dogs are frequently mislabeled, even mistakenly identified, with only small traces of actual pit bull DNA.
“Are they going to do genetic testing?” Alboum questioned. “Because there are dogs out there that don't look anything like pit bulls that have no pit bull in them.”
Lana Carson, the director of the Pound Buddies Animal Shelter and Adoption Center, said the ban is leading to a lot of misinformation surrounding the breed.
“It's really demonizing just a dog based on the look,” Carlson said.
The City of Muskegon in March moved to reverse its own ordinance, which had previously dubbed the dogs “dangerous.”
“We have a responsibility to these animals,” Carson suggested. “If they buy into that hype, absolutely, shelters are not going to have adopters. There are going to be dogs that are going to lose their lives because of this.”
Also working in county animal control, Carson said her experience has shown her any animal could exhibit aggressive tendencies under the right circumstances.
“There was a dog that had an issue, and now everybody's discounted,” Alboum said.
She said she'd like to see dog owners take more responsibility, along with better enforcement of existing public safety and animal welfare laws.
“I think that a lot of these decisions are knee-jerk reactions to an incident, which is even more devastating to think about the thousands of pit bulls that live around in the area,” Alboum said. “Because of a couple of bad incidents, they're all banned. It's just — that's not who we are.”
The Bissell Pet Foundation’s annual "Empty the Shelters" event — which facilitates reduced adoption fees at shelters across the nation in an effort to address overcrowding — launches next week.
For more details, visit the Foundation’s website.
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