A Breed Apart? Narrating Innocence and Viciousness in Breed-Specific Legislation

Narratives of vicious pit bulls and children at risk are foundational to arguments in favour of breed-specific legislation (BSL), a pre-emptive form of governance, implemented in select provinces, states, and municipalities around the world, that works (or does not work, as the case may be), not by policing vicious dog behaviour, but by preventing the existence of supposedly intrinsically vicious members of chosen breeds. Though the breed targeted differs depending on context, most often included is, not surprisingly, that canine-non-grata, the pit bull. Taking Ontario’s “pit bull ban” (Bill 132) as a case study, this essay tracks the figure of the pit bull, first in the parliamentary debates leading up to the passing of the law, and then in a subsequently published juvenile novel, Ingrid Lee’s Dog Lost (2008), a text that deploys a familiar narrative of boy-and-dog as an explicit response to Ontario’s BSL. If BSL is predicated on pit bulls being, as Ontario’s Attorney General Michael Bryant put it, “a breed apart”—that is, they must be recognizable, first as “a breed,” and second as a breed that is distinct from all others, or at least from all others that are not covered by BSL—Lee’s narrative too suggests that these dogs might be exceptional, for, like so many canine protagonists, Lee’s “Cash” is hyperbolically noble, the polar opposite of the “commonsense” narrative of the pit bull—the pit bull that “everyone knows.” And, in narrating the experience of her exceptional pit bull under the looming threat of BSL, Lee offers a productive reminder that—attacks by particular, individual dogs notwithstanding—the essentially vicious pit bull, the one that is, as Bryant put it, “a breed apart,” is itself a social construction, and one with very material consequences for dogs and children alike.