Carstairs, Alberta, has a dog bylaw that restricts three "breeds". One isn’t a breed at all and the other two are misspelled!<\/p>\n
They’ve also added the usual catch-all phrase as well, but this one is a little strange. It reads, "and any type of dog of shared breeding with one of these classes of breeds". Not quite sure what a "class of breed" is.<\/p>\n
Clearly, the people who created this law had no idea what they were writing.<\/p>\n
How can you decide that a certain type of dog is dangerous when you can’t even spell the breed names? If the extent of your knowledge of dogs is so small that you can’t write your bylaw properly, then how can you possibly claim to have enough knowledge of dog behaviour to determine that type A will act one way and type B another way?<\/p>\n
Dog Control Bylaw 728 (Adobe Acrobat PDF file)<\/a><\/p>\n And talk about micro-managing. This town of around 2,700 people has a longer list of offences than I’ve seen anywhere else (along with the individual fines per offence for first, second and third offences). In fact, from what I can tell, this town’s animal control bylaws are more complicated and restrictive than those of the entire city of Toronto, which has 1,000 times as many people!<\/p>\n