It isn’t clear yet what the town council of Moreauville, Louisiana, were thinking on 13 October. According to one member, Alderman Penn Lemoine, they’d had complaints from residents “about not being able to walk along the neighborhoods because these dogs were basically running along town”. The solution they devised, passed by a large majority, was a new law to protect the 900 or so townspeople from “dangerous dogs”.
In Britain, the phrase calls to mind our own Dangerous Dogs Act (1991), which quickly became a byword for bad lawmaking because it is so hard to prove that a given dog is dangerous. The Moreauville authorities therefore produced something simpler, and worse. Under the new ordinance, from 1 December, it will be illegal to keep any rottweiler or pitbull (including staffies) in the town. For local woman Joanna Armand and her family, this means they have only a few days left to find a new home for their pet pitbull Zeus. Zeus has never been accused of biting anybody, and is a valuable companion for her disabled daughter O’Hara. If they do not get rid of him, however, he will be impounded and, after 30 days, destroyed.
RT! Over 85k are fighting to #SaveZeus from being put down. Sign their petition:http://t.co/CbU5WaB1K0 #AnimalRights pic.twitter.com/gJtbPaoeM9
— MoveOn.org (@MoveOn) November 23, 2014
As you might expect – and as the council should have – Armand is fighting. “I sure hope the town of Moreauville is ready to be put on the map!” she announced in a Facebook post last Tuesday. “What I have up my sleeve is probably more than this town bargained for!”
By now it is probably more than she bargained for as well. Her petition calling for the law to be repealed has so far had more than 147,000 signatures. Zeus has appeared on CNN. More or less every website connected with Moreauville is now covered with angry, at times hysterical, abuse. After the council approved a local vet to “handle” any impounded dogs, the clinic had to issue a statement insisting that it would do no such thing. “We are against the ban as well as everyone else!” it said. It surely cannot be long now until a U-turn gives Zeus his reprieve, but Armand and her family are assuming nothing. “They’re going to have to take him from my cold, dead hands,” O’Hara says.
