Internet rallies to save ‘pit bull’ on death row
Leonard Collins came home to his Belfast flat on July 14 to a notice on his door telling him that his apartment had been searched and his dog, Hank, seized.
Earlier in the day, as many as eight Northern Ireland police officers – ‘‘some with riot gear,’’ neighbours later told him – entered his apartment to seize Hank, a large sandy-coloured dog with big, sad eyes who, the Belfast City Council said, could possibly be a ‘‘pit bull’’.
‘‘I couldn’t believe what I was reading,’’ Collins said. ‘‘I was flabbergasted.’’
Collins and his ex-girlfriend Joanne Meadows (‘‘We share responsibility for Hank,’’’ he says.) immediately took to social media to plead Hank’s case and launch a #savehank campaign that has drawn nearly 300,000 signatures to an online petition, raised at least US$25,000 for a legal defence fund, and made ‘‘death row dog Hank’’ a British media obsession.
Since then, for nearly two weeks, they’ve waited. The city could decide to euthanise Hank – under one of many controversial ‘‘pit bull bans’’ – without any evidence that he has ever been aggressive.
In a letter to Collins, the council notes that the ‘‘pitbull terrier-type dog is illegal in Northern Ireland’’ and that it will ‘‘undertake a full assessment’’ of Hank’s characteristics to determine whether he is a pit bull. But the council won’t tell Collins what sort of assessment this will be.
‘‘A couple of times people had stopped us and said, ‘Oh, he looks like a pit bull’,’’ Collins said. ‘‘But I never had a real concern.’’
He said Hank could bark at strangers, and suspected that was what caused someone to complain to the council.
A spokesperson for the Belfast City Council declined to comment on Hank but issued a statement explaining the scenarios the dog and his owners now face.
If Hank is determined to be both a banned breed and a ‘‘present danger to the public’’, he is likely to face a death sentence – at which point, Collins is promising to take the matter to court.
As Collins, Meadows and thousands of followers await the council’s verdict, the case shines a harsh light on the breed-specific legislation that started in the United States in the mid-1980s amid the start of a pit bull panic and eventually swept the world. Its popularity has slowed in recent years – Italy and the Netherlands have dropped their bans.
Many animal experts are quick to point out that ‘‘pit bull’’ is not an exact breed but rather a vague classification that loosely targets a wide variety of breeds.
Collins says he thinks Hank is half Labrador retriever and half Staffordshire bull terrier.
The United Kingdom’s sweeping Dangerous Dog Act of 1991 specifically bans the American pit bull terrier, along with Japanese Tosa, Dogo Argentino and Fila Brasileiro. But Northern Ireland’s ban targets only ‘‘the pit bull terrier’’ – a vague description.
A recent study in the Veterinary Journal surveyed four animal shelters, asking their workers to identify which of their dogs were ‘‘pit bull breeds’’.
Out of 120 dogs, the shelter staff identified 62 as pit bulls, but DNA tests revealed that only 25 were.