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Ban Tethering: Law Can Prevent More Terrible Tragedies

Editorial, The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer

January 16, 2004, When a child dies a violent death, the whole community feels the pain. Throughout this area today, there is great sadness for the terrible tragedy that befell a 3-year-old boy in Anderson Creek Tuesday. After the mourning, there should be anger. It was a preventable tragedy - preventable, that is, if the state or local communities would revise animal-control ordinances that are mired in an unenlightened past.

Little Nathan Roy Hill wandered into a neighbor's yard Tuesday, where he encountered the chained, mixed-breed pit bull that killed him. A "Beware of the Dog" sign is fastened to a tree in the dog's yard, but that couldn't protect a guileless child.

Nathan's death isn't unprecedented in North Carolina. In 1999, 2-year-old Kimberly Renee Arriola was attacked and killed by a chained Siberian husky in a neighbor's yard in Sampson County. Just over a year ago, 2 1/2-year-old Samantha Fuller of Roxboro died when she got too close to a neighbor's chained German shepherd. Other, similar incidents have been reported around the state.

The incidents are a demonstration of a simple correlation between the practice of tethering dogs and dogs' aggressiveness. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has studied the causes of dog bites and found that tethered dogs are nearly three times more likely to attack people, causing serious injury or death. It's reasonable to extrapolate from that point: If the chained dog is of a normally aggressive breed - like pit bulls - the potential for danger is even greater. There is overwhelming evidence that regular or continuous tethering makes dogs neurotic, anxious and aggressive. The practice is inhumane and unsafe. Dogs left outside and unsupervised - especially aggressive dogs - should be confined by fencing or other means.

Since 1997, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has banned most forms of tethering in any facilities that are regulated by its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. That includes many breeding, wholesale and research facilities.

Some tethering is banned by North Carolina law. But the regulation largely applies to pit bull breeders who use heavy chains "grossly in excess of the size necessary to restrain the dog." The law is so vague that it is largely unenforceable.

New Hanover County, however, has banned all tethering. Fayetteville briefly did the same, when it adopted a new animal-control ordinance in 2001. But the City Council, apparently more willing to risk children's lives than face constituent anger, caved in to political pressure shortly thereafter and removed the tethering ban.

A North Carolina House study committee has been holding hearings on the state's animal welfare statutes this winter and will recommend changes to the House when it returns to session later this year. One of those recommendations should be a statewide ban on dog tethering.

If the state fails to act, we hope the counties in this region will follow New Hanover's wise lead and amend their animal-control ordinances to ban tethering. There is a clear and obvious threat to public safety, and it's government's obligation to act.

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