Caroline Kisko on Why the Dangerous Dogs Act Was Failing, and What Should Have Replaced It

Based on an original BBC One TV interview with Caroline Kisko in the aftermath of the death of Ellie Lawrenson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P0xfCsMPSw

When I joined BBC One on the morning after five-year-old Ellie Lawrenson was killed by a banned pit-bull-type dog at a relative's home in St Helens, the country was, understandably, looking for somebody to blame and something to ban. I was on the sofa alongside Bill Lambert, a breeder of English Bull Terriers, and we were both asked the question that always followed a tragedy of that kind. Which breeds are the dangerous ones, and why are they not already outlawed?

It was the wrong question. I said so then, and I would say so again now. What follows is an expanded version of the argument I tried to make on air.

The Dangerous Dogs Act Was a Knee-Jerk

The Dangerous Dogs Act was passed in 1991 as a direct response to a wave of high-profile attacks. It singled out specific breeds, including the pit bull terrier, and banned them outright. The logic was simple. Identify the dangerous breeds, remove them, and the attacks would stop.

By 2007, when I sat down to discuss Ellie's death, the evidence was already clear. Breed-specific legislation did not work. The attacks had not stopped. A child had just been killed by a dog of a banned type, in a country that had banned that type for sixteen years. If the law had been effective, that conversation would not have been happening.

The Act was a knee-jerk response to genuine horror. I understood why it was passed. But understanding why something was passed is not the same as defending whether it worked.

Some Breeds Were More Capable of Harm, But That Was Not the Same as Dangerous

I want to be careful here, because this point was misunderstood on air and is still misunderstood now.

Some breeds were physically capable of causing more harm than others. A bite from a Chihuahua and a bite from a large breed were not equivalent injuries. That was a matter of size, jaw strength and weight. It was not in dispute.

What was in dispute was the leap from "this breed can do more damage" to "this breed is inherently dangerous." A dog of any size, of any breed, of any cross, could be turned into a dangerous animal by poor breeding, poor socialisation and poor ownership. Equally, a dog of a so-called dangerous breed could be a sound family pet in the right hands. Bill made this point about the English Bull Terrier, a dog that looks fierce and is, in well-bred and well-trained form, remarkably placid. The same was true of many of the breeds people instinctively feared.

The variable that mattered most was not the breed. It was the human at the other end of the lead.

Image, Status, and the Wrong Reasons to Own a Dog

The report that ran before our segment captured something the legislation could not. Dogs were being acquired for how they looked, not for what they were. Crossbreeds with a tough appearance were being bought as accessories of status and image. They were often poorly socialised, kept away from strangers and other animals, and they grew into nervous, reactive adults. Then, when they became inconvenient, they were handed over to rescues like the Dogs Trust in Sadberge, where rehoming a stocky cross with a wide head was already close to impossible.

This was a human problem. It could not be fixed by adding more breeds to a banned list, because the people buying for image were not deterred by lists. If anything, the lists made certain dogs more attractive to them.

Licensing Was Not the Answer Either

The natural follow-up question on air was whether we should bring back dog licensing. I said then that I did not think it would help, and I still do not.

In the vast majority of cases where a dog bit somebody, we already knew who owned the dog. The information gap was not the problem. Adding a licence would have added a layer of bureaucracy and a tax, without changing the behaviour of the people whose behaviour actually needed to change.

Responsible owners would have registered. Irresponsible owners would not have, and enforcement would have been almost impossible.

A licence is only useful if it changes something. A flat licence for every owner would not have.

What Should Have Replaced the Act

The Kennel Club had, by that point, been working with the Metropolitan Police, the veterinary organisations, the Dogs Trust and others on a draft replacement for the Dangerous Dogs Act. The principles we wanted to see were straightforward.

First, the law should have focused on individual dogs and individual owners, not on breeds. If a particular dog was a cause for concern, raised with the local authority as Ellie's family's dog had been, then the owner should have been required to have that dog trained. Compulsory training, triggered by genuine risk, would have done far more than a banned list ever did.

Second, the law should have applied inside private homes as well as in public. Ellie was killed in a relative's house. At the time, the legislation did not reach into that setting. That was a serious gap, and closing it should not have been controversial.

Third, the conversation needed to extend to children. The Kennel Club's Safe and Sound scheme was designed to teach children how to behave around dogs, how to read the signals, and how to stay safe. No amount of legislation would ever remove every risk. Teaching children how to live alongside dogs sensibly was, and remains, part of the answer.

What Responsible Breeders Were Already Doing

One point I wanted to put on the record, and which Bill made well on the day, was that responsible breeders were already doing much of what legislation could not. A good breeder did not sell to anybody who turned up with the cash. They asked questions. They turned people away. They matched dogs to families and they refused matches that looked wrong.

The problem was never the responsible breeders. The problem was the unregulated end of the market, where crossbreeds of uncertain temperament were produced in volume for buyers who wanted a look rather than a companion. There was, frankly, nothing to stop anyone breeding a crossbreed of any type.

The only real check was the public itself. If buyers went to responsible breeders, asked the Kennel Club for advice, and refused to buy from sources that did not ask questions back, the market would have shifted. It still could.

A Final Thought

Ellie Lawrenson's death was a tragedy and it deserved a serious response. What it got, in the years that followed, was mostly more of the same. More breeds added to lists. More headlines after each new attack. Less attention to the harder, slower work of regulating owners, requiring training, closing the private-home loophole, and teaching children how to be around dogs.

I argued on air, on a difficult morning, that the right response to a failure of legislation was better legislation, not louder legislation. That argument has not aged.

This post is based on an original BBC One TV interview with Caroline Kisko, then of the Kennel Club, broadcast in the immediate aftermath of the death of Ellie Lawrenson in 2007.