Best Friends
for Life: Humane housing for animals and
people
(
2002. 40
pages, paperback. $2.95.
The price of Best Friends for Life is certainly right: individual copies are free. Ordering is quick and easy: call 202-546-1761, or send an e-mail to info@ddal.org.
Jointly published by the Doris Day Animal League and the Massachusetts SPCA, Best Friends for Life updates and greatly expands a manual originally issued in 1996. The first edition covered only the right of disabled people to keep pets in federally assisted housing. The first half of this edition revisits that subject, adding discussion of recent relevant court cases. The second half presents information useful to any tenant, any landlord, and any organization which deals with the problems associated with keeping pets in rental housing.
One of the organizations that
compiled Best Friends for Life, the MSPCA, has long been among the most
successful innovators in opening rental housing to petkeeping
tenants. It offers landlord/tenant advice that worked in
The other compiling organization, the Doris Day Animal League, is among the national groups with the longest involvement in support of neuter/return feral cat population control, and shares much information from that perspective.
As feral cats are not mentioned in most other manuals about animals and landlords, yet are perhaps the second most frequent cause of landlord/tenant conflict, after barking dogs, this addition--though containing nothing new to veteran cat rescuers--is timely and necessary.
Best Friends for Life offers no specific information about the peculiarities of keeping exotic predators, birds, reptiles, fish, and hooved animals in rental accommodations. Few other publications do, either. Relevant sections could be added to future editions, as the ANIMAL PEOPLE files indicate that among the kinds of animals-in-housing conflicts most likely to blow up into lawsuits or other public incidents are neighbors' discoveries of lions, tigers, wolf hybrids, and other large predators in rented property; birds making noise at dawn; flies attracted by bird excrement; snakes escaping into other people's apartments; fish tanks breaking or overflowing; and noise and mess associated with keeping large hooved animals in small back yards. The conflicts typically result from a combination of irresponsibility on the part of the tenants, objections from neighbors, and landlords who readily accept a tenant with an unusual pet if the price is right, but are equally quick to evict if reminded of a potential liability.
The major weakness of Best Friends for Life is that for philosophical reasons, and perhaps in deference to the vociferousness of pit bull terrier advocates, it categorically opposes any sort of breed-specific restrictions on dog-keeping.
States a sidebar, "The MSPCA believes that breed-specific bans are not an effective way to control dangerous or aggressive dogs. A breed ban does not impact dogs of other breeds that may be dangerous."
This is disingenuous, because dogs of breeds which frequently kill and maim people and other animals in their first known biting incidents are inherently more potentially dangerous than dogs of breeds which rarely if ever kill or maim anyone--just as any loaded gun is inherently more potentially dangerous than an unloaded gun or no gun, no matter how carefully the gun is kept locked away.
Further, the existence of breed-specific regulation, whether in a city or in a duplex, does not preclude also enforcing a "comprehensive pet policy banning all dangerous or aggressive animals," of any breed or species, as the MSPCA and Best Friends for Life recommend instead. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Best Friends for Life is correct in noting that in legal terms, "pit bull terrier has proven to be particularly difficult to define because it is used to describe many types of dogs, some of which vary widely in appearance and size."
This does not mean, however, that a landlord should be given the implied choice of either accepting all dogs except those individuals somehow officially deemed aggressive, or no dogs--especially considering that landlords are liable for injuries occurring on their property, and have often been sued for the conduct of tenants' dogs.
One such case before the courts
right now resulted from the failure of a
Even should the landlord prevail, as
landlord Harrison Aldrich did in a similar case decided on January 30 by the
Maine Supreme Court, the landlord must still bear the stress and expense of
fighting liability claims,
and may lose insurance coverage if the insurer decides that winning
or losing, the landlord is incurring unacceptable economic risk by accepting
certain types of dog, big dogs, or any dogs.
Landlord
options
Insurers are at liberty to set breed-restrictive policies, and often do. Landlords are at liberty to change insurers, but in practice, that is not easily done in many areas, and landlords are rarely at legal liberty to be uninsured. Therefore, the rental policy choice is often between "all dogs" and "no dogs."
Under that circumstance, "no
dogs" or even "no pets" is by far the safest choice. "No dogs" and "no pets"
policies in turn deny homes to somewhere between 4.3 million and 6.5 million
dogs and cats per year, according to data developed by pets-in-housing advocate
Ruth Smiler in a March 2000 ANIMAL PEOPLE guest
column. These are the numbers of additional
pets who would be kept if renters in pet-restricted
housing were allowed to keep animals in the same numbers as other renters,
and/or kept animals in the same numbers as home owners. Implicit in the numbers is that the number of
pets who might be adopted if renters were allowed to adopt is almost the same
or even larger than the number of dogs and cats who are killed each year in
Considerable animal advocate
confusion about the relevant issues having to do with risk and principle may
occur because all dogs are, biologically speaking, members
of a single species. No such confusion occurs
with cats because felis domesticus
occurs only in a relatively non-threatening size range. Hardly anyone has any difficulty accepting
that
possession of a cat large enough to kill and eat people and other pets of
normal size should be regulated differently from felis
domesticus,
because a cat that big is usually a lion, a tiger,
or a puma, each clearly a
different species.
Domestic dogs, however, range from teacup poodles smaller than most housecats up to Great Danes, ho stand higher than any cat and can outweigh a puma.
To confuse matters further, although all reputedly dangerous dog breeds are large, size per se is not their distinguishing trait. Presa Canarios and mastiffs are near the upper end of the size range, but many breeds which rarely kill or injure anyone, such as St. Bernards, are typically much bigger than pit bulls, Rottweilers, and wolf hybrids.
As many legal and philosophical problems as these facts pose, however, they no more mean that landlords--and legislators--should treat all dogs as if they were the same than the fact that lions, tigers, and pumas can also be trained to use a litter box means that they should be regulated like felis domesticus. There are inherent differences among breeds of dog, just as among species of cat, which as a matter of common sense must be recognized and taken into account.
The alternative is to continue to
pretend that it is mere happenstance that pit bulls for 20 consecutive years
have accounted for approximately half of all the life-threatening and fatal dog
attacks in the U.S. and Canada, Rottweilers have accounted for approximately 25%, and the other 95% of the dog population has
accounted for the remainder. Neither
German shepherds,
Dobermans, chows, Akitas, huskies, nor any other breed has ever approached doing
a comparable
level of mayhem, regardless of propensity to inflict non-life-threatening bites--but a reasonable case can be made that any breed of high bite risk should logically be housed with greater care than breeds which rarely bite.
The idea behind pretending that all
dogs are equal is supposedly to save pit bull terriers, Rottweilers, et al from "breed discrimination," and thereby to save their lives. This is not working. Forcing landlords and communities into
"all dogs" or "no dogs" choicemaking
has not in the least diminished the numbers of pit bulls and Rottweilers killed in animal shelters, which have soared even as killing of all
other dogs has plummeted. However, this pretense
is causing tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other dogs to
be killed because rented homes are closed to them, whose doors might be open if the landlords
were allowed to say, "German
shepherds, yes, if well behaved and kept under control; pit bulls
no," because pit bulls who kill
someone were often well-behaved--perhaps better behaved than the average
dog--right up until the moment of the fatal attack. –Merritt Clifton, Animal People.