Ripon sends a powerful message to dog owners - Don't license your dogs!
Letters went out Thursday to over 40 owners of pit bulls licensed in Ripon, California. The letters informed these owners, who were conscientious and responsible enough to license their dogs, that their pets must be sterilized by the end of the year. These owners should be thankful, we suppose, that they didn't live in a city that implemented a breed ban, because then these conscientious and responsible owners who licensed their pets would likely be receiving very different kinds of letters -- ones telling them to surrender their pets to be killed.
While sterilizing a pet is always a good idea, targeting a specific breed is just plain, old-fashioned discrimination.
Even though there haven't been any reported Pit Bull attacks on humans in the last couple of years, Ripon still decided that it needed to sterilize Pit Bulls to reduce aggressive animals, at least according to Police Chief Richard Bull. (We can't help but notice that his last name is quite appropriate, since it's certainly bull that sterilizing dogs will solve the problem of dangerous animals).
Regardless of why Ripon decided it needed to sterilize Pit Bulls in an attempt to rid the city of dangerous dogs, Ripon has taught its residents the following lesson:
Don't license your dogs, because when the law changes, yours will be one of the first doors knocked on by Animal Control officers.