When an ordinance names a breed

The legal survey of this magazine rests on a North Carolina fact that adopters find reassuring: the state statute judges the individual dog and names no breed. The less reassuring fact is the one underneath it. The rules that name breeds exist one level down, in the ordinances of towns and counties, and a household that assumes the state’s silence is the whole story is a household that has not read the municipal code of the place it is moving to.

What is breed specific legislation, exactly?

It is a law that regulates or prohibits a dog by what it is rather than by what it has done: a breed name written into an ordinance, with restrictions, permits, insurance requirements or bans attached to the label. The campaign against that kind of law is documented in detail at a site on breed specific legislation, which covers the critique of the bans, their effects on shelters, insurers and housing, and the behavior based alternatives cities have adopted instead. The position the veterinary profession publishes is aligned with that critique: the American Veterinary Medical Association’s standing material on dangerous animal legislation at avma.org explains why laws that judge the individual dog outlast the ones that judge the label.

Where does breed naming actually live in the law?

In the municipal code, not the state code. The difference is the one the legal survey teaches a household to keep straight: the statute in chapter 67 of the General Statutes defines a dangerous dog by its acts and creates the procedure that names it; an ordinance is a town’s own writing, and it can reach where the statute does not, including the naming of breeds. The check is always the same four lines: identify the author of the rule, find the current text, quote the section, date the reading. The procedure for that checking is the survey’s method throughout, described in law and insurance.

What does a named ordinance mean for a household?

It means the label on the dog does legal work the dog’s behavior never gets to do. In a town that names the breed, the household may owe a permit, a liability policy, a muzzle in public, or nothing at all, and the only honest answer is the text of that town’s code, read current. The municipal layer is where the insurance question and the legal question meet: an ordinance that names the breed and an insurer that excludes it are two different authors writing to the same address, and a household can satisfy one and still fail the other, which is why the survey treats the insurance regime as its own document.

How do you check a town before moving or adopting?

The same way the survey checks everything: from the document, dated. The municipal code is published; the animal control chapter names whatever it names; the city clerk answers in writing. A mover adopting across a state line runs this check as part of the route, and the comparison of what survives the move between the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland is in adopting across state lines. For the household already home, the check is a single afternoon: the code of the town, the policy of the insurer, and the lease if the address is rented, each read at its own source.

The individual dog inside the label

• The author of the rule is the first check: a statute lives in the General Statutes, an ordinance in the municipal code, and a contract in the policy’s own wording.
• The text is read current: codes are amended and refiled, and a household quoting a section writes down the date it read it.
• The four lines of the method are the survey’s whole discipline: identify the author, find the text, quote the section, keep the document.
• A town that names the breed and an insurer that excludes it are two different authors to the same address, and satisfying one does not satisfy the other.
• The designation procedure is the state’s answer: the individual dog is judged on what it did, and the label survives only where a local code kept it.

The whole question of named ordinances collapses into the one this magazine keeps returning to: whether a dog is judged by what it is or by what it does. North Carolina’s statute chose the second, and the municipal codes that choose the first are the exception the statute’s silence permits rather than forbids. A household that has read both documents knows where it stands, which is all the law pages of this magazine exist to provide.