Page 3302 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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The experience in other jurisdictions has not been promising, to say the least. In Queensland, for example, I have heard of many examples of staffordshire terriers, which generally speaking are quite a docile breed, being confused with pit bulls, and of perfectly safe pets being euthanased. Unless they are your dog, of course they do not really concern us, but this is the situation. On the other hand, we know of other dogs—apart from the silky terriers—which suddenly turn on children and other people, totally out of the blue, and they do not belong to this breed. I think the only way you could effectively do this is ban all dogs—or a better solution is to control the reproduction of problem breeds.
So we need to strengthen the desexing requirements as much as possible so that these breeds are effectively bred out, if such a thing is possible. We seem to be better at getting rid of endangered species than dangerous dogs, but anyway we should give it a go, rather than these being arbitrarily and ineffectively controlled by the registrar.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella—Minister for the Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Housing and Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (5.51): We will not be supporting this amendment. Dangerous dogs are currently declared dangerous in the ACT based on their behaviour as individual dogs; it is not their breed. As I indicated earlier, it is the deed, not the breed. Declaring dogs dangerous on the basis of their breed will lead to a significant increase in the number of declared dangerous dogs in the ACT. I also need to make a comment on what Dr Foskey said—that we perhaps could breed out these breeds. That is a nice idea; it is a great idea—in the same way we can breed out racial prejudice and we can breed out discrimination.
The fact is that we are right on a border. We have no hope of doing such things in the ACT unless we have border patrols which say, “If you come into this place with a bull terrier, we will arrest you.” It just ain’t going to happen. You just cannot do it. Unless there is a national approach to this sort of this issue it is not going to happen.
There would be significant administrative costs involved in administering, registering and enforcing such legislation and the ACT is a small jurisdiction with limited resources available for breed-specific legislation and enforcement. There would be a need to call on expert advice, expert panels, to define the breed types. Appeal procedures would need to be defined to process dangerous dog species declarations. Defining cross-breeds as dangerous based on the breed types expressed would be problematic and open to challenge by dog owners. Mr Pratt actually referred to Dr Foskey’s cross-breed—was it a bull terrier or a Queensland cattle dog?
DR FOSKEY: Is this a border collie—
MR HARGREAVES: No, it was your cross-breed cattle dog. There are definitional issues around that. Which breed could be considered dangerous? Currently in New South Wales and Victoria less than 10 breed species are regarded as potentially dangerous under legislation. The New South Wales Department of Local Government in 2007 reported its dog attack statistics compiled from council records for the year July 2004 to June 2005. There were 29 pure breeds of dogs identified as being involved in attacks during that year. Of these, 15 pure breeds were involved in more than 10 attacks.
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