Gold Coast City Council drives Australia’s largest dog cull

Unless you’re a ‘pit bull’ owner it’s likely that you’ve not spent much time considering whether breed specific laws will ever effect you. However, the story of Tango should be enough to convince anyone that there are literally hundreds of thousands of dogs of all breeds under risk from these laws.

Tango and his owners John Mokomoko and Kylie Chivers

Tango was a dog impounded by the Gold Coast City Council in 2004. Deemed to be a ‘pit bull’ by animal management officers and under threat of death, Tango’s owners John Mokomoko and Kylie Chivers, maintained he was an American Staffy, a breed recognised by the Australian Kennel Council. They hired a lawyer and had him moved to NSW, where he still lives today in private kennels.

Rather than take this on the chin, the family decided to fight for their pet, who had never hurt anyone. In the process, according to The Australian, John Mokomoko has gone on to be “the Gold Coast City Council’s worst nightmare”:

A relentlessly methodical litigant who has helped humiliate the expertise of council dog catchers in court and amassed a file on 5000 Queensland dogs that he claims were either destroyed or forced interstate on the basis of wrongful identification as pit bulls.

In February he aims to convince the Queensland Supreme Court that Tango got a bum rap, and that thousands of dogs like him across Queensland may have been wrongfully dispatched to the big kennel in the sky. The case, he believes, will open a floodgate of ­litigation. “I’ve got a list of around 5000 dog owners in southeast Queensland who are waiting for someone to get a win in the Supreme Court,” he says. “Each case could eventually cost the councils at least half a million dollars. Once the precedent has been set, it’ll open a Pandora’s box.”

Mokomoko’s biggest victory, may be the case of Logan City Council v Rusty The Hound. Caught wandering in suburban Brisbane in April 2005, Rusty was impounded and sentenced to death after being identified as a pit bull by three council experts – one of whom was Deborah Pomeroy, a Brisbane City Council animal control supervisor who helped devise and teach the 22-point dog identification system used across southern Queensland.

Mokomoko helped Rusty’s owner, Dino Da Fre, marshall a legal defence and the DNA evidence necessary to prove the dog was a Staffie cross-breed, and during the court hearing Pomeroy admitted she was self-trained, had no veterinarian qualifications and could claim no scientific basis for the identification system she’d helped devise. With its case in tatters, Logan City Council withdrew after six days of hearings, having spent more than $100,000.

After five years and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by the council challenging and losing these cases under the failed ’22 point checklist’, the Council yesterday won the case against Tango, with a Supreme Court Judge ruling Tango was an American Pit bull and needed to be destroyed.

But with local media outlets now describing Tango’s story as a ‘heart-rending story’, and battered and bruised from past losses, the Gold Coast City Council were reluctant to face the negativity publicity should they now send the order impound and kill Tango. So they instead asked the state government for permission to expand their killing operations to be allowed to also kill animals who weren’t pit bulls. Problem solved!

Councillor Bob La Castra, at a press conference this afternoon, said the court’s decision confirmed the position the Gold Coast Council had taken.

He called on the Queensland Government to clarify whether American Staffordshire terriers should be treated the same as pit bulls, saying no further action would be taken until the State Government made their intentions known.

“We will just, pardon the pun, be chasing our tail until such time as we know what the State Government ruling is,” he said.

With an estimated 50,000 American Staffies in Queensland alone and an untold number of strong and weak crosses nationwide, the gentle slip to the expansion of breed specific legislation has begun. This is incredibly bad news for dogs.

Why? Because when you can’t accurately tell a pitbull, from a similar looking dog that’s the point. By starting to cull dogs who look like pit bulls, you’re no longer judging on breed (or a perceived problem with a breed) but truly on the way a group of dog ‘looks’.

Now anti-BSL advocates have been saying this is the problem with BSL for decades; but it’s taken this ruling and this council to reveal just how real this is. Short haired? Square headed? Medium sized? That’s a ‘pit bull type dog’ (not a pit bull) and would now be included under this legislation. Given that bullmastiffs, boxers, shar peis, mastiffs, ridgebacks, labradors, bulldogs and anything with a staffy in the mix have all been identified as ‘pit bulls’ in the past, this opens the floodgates to no longer having to prove a dog is of anything but ‘pit bull type’.

All dog owners should be outraged at this attack on our pets.

Watch Tango’s Channel 9, ACA video here