In a criminal courtroom, the first question is whether the defendant did it. In a dangerous-dog case, that question is usually settled before anyone sits down. Everybody agrees a bite happened. Everybody agrees which dog’s teeth were involved.
What is actually being decided is something much slipperier: who is at fault for the situation those teeth ended up in. And in that fight, one thing tips the scale more reliably than any fact of the case, which is how big your dog is and what people think they know about the breed.
Richard Rosenthal has spent the better part of two decades arguing that this is backwards. Alongside his wife, Robin Mittasch, he runs the Lexus Project, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to dogs under euthanasia orders. He has litigated these cases in 29 states and taken on more than 100 of them, and he says the same distortion shows up over and over.
As Rosenthal frames it, these cases rarely turn on whether the dog bit anyone; that part is usually conceded. What they actually adjudicate is the cause of the incident and who bears the blame for it.
The size problem, in plain terms
Picture a scuffle between a Chihuahua and a Pit Bull. Rosenthal’s experience is that the Pit Bull draws the charge nearly every time, no matter who started it.
The mechanics are almost boringly simple. When a small dog picks a fight with a large one, the small dog is the one that gets hurt. The injuries all point one direction, so the incident report reads one direction, and by the time it reaches a hearing officer, the larger animal is the aggressor in the story. From the dog’s point of view, Rosenthal argues, it was defending itself. From the paperwork’s point of view, it mauled somebody’s pet.
The same logic breaks down further once a human steps between two fighting dogs and gets bitten. A person reaching into a fight is one of the most common ways bite cases become legal cases, and it is also the moment when responsibility gets hardest to assign fairly.
“Dogs in a fight are running on adrenaline and reflex, not judgment. A hand that enters that space is not read as a hand, it’s read as another moving thing in a fight,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “That’s not a dangerous dog. That’s a dog that can’t tell the difference in that half-second, which is nearly all of them.”
The breed is often decided by whoever writes the report
The distortion compounds when police are involved. Rosenthal says it is routine for an officer who shoots a dog to describe the animal as a Pit Bull afterward and to state that they feared for their life, regardless of what the dog actually was. His blunter view is that many of these shootings come from people who are terrified of dogs to begin with, and that handing someone like that a firearm and the discretion to use it is a recipe for a dead animal that was never a real threat.
The scale of this is genuinely hard to pin down, and it is worth being honest about why. The number you will see repeated is that American police kill 25 to 30 dogs a day, which traces back to a Department of Justice community-policing official quoted in a trade magazine, not to a rigorous count. The real figure is unknown, because most law enforcement agencies do not keep records of the animals they shoot. A 2018 DOJ community-policing report described the problem as widespread enough to warrant national training guidance, and the training exists precisely because officers so often read a curious, fast-moving, friendly dog as a charging one.
What is not in doubt is the labeling. Once “Pit Bull” is on the report, it travels with the case.
What actually happens if your dog is declared dangerous
This is the part almost no owner knows until they are standing in it, and it is where a few hours of preparation change outcomes more than anything else.
A dangerous-dog proceeding is usually administrative, not criminal. It happens in front of a hearing officer, a municipal court, or an animal control board. That has two consequences that catch people completely off guard:
- The formal rules of evidence often do not apply. Hearsay is frequently admitted. A neighbor’s secondhand account of what somebody else saw can land in the record.
- Nobody appoints a lawyer for you. There is no public defender for a dog.
But you are not without rights, because dogs are legally your property, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments say the government cannot take your property without due process. In practice, that gives you a floor:
- Notice. You are entitled to be told a hearing is happening, and what the allegation is.
- A real chance to contest it. Not just to attend, but to see the case against your dog and answer it.
- The right to put on evidence. Veterinary records, training history, behavior evaluations, photographs of the scene, fence and gate conditions, and witnesses who saw the incident.
- The right to appeal. In most jurisdictions an adverse ruling can be challenged administratively or in court.
The procedural failures that get these findings overturned are usually mundane: no notice sent, no opportunity given to respond, no specific written findings explaining what standard the dog supposedly met. If your dog is facing a hearing, ask for the written ordinance, the standard being applied, and the evidence file, in writing, before the date.
And get a lawyer if you can. The gap between an owner who shows up with a folder and an owner who shows up to explain that their dog is a sweetheart is enormous.
The greyhound who started all of this
Rosenthal did not set out to do any of this. For three decades he ran his own practice, mostly handling family matters and criminal defense. Then, in 2009, a single case rearranged his career.
He and Mittasch, longtime lovers of the breed, saw a post on a Greyhound message board about a dog named Lexus, about a week retired from racing, at a park in Rhode Island. A person there let their six-month-old Pomeranian run with the big dogs, thinking it was cute.
Rosenthal’s point about the breed is that a running Greyhound isn’t racing in its own mind, it’s hunting, and a small animal darting across the grass registers as one thing only: something to catch. The dog wasn’t being vicious. It was being a sighthound.
The Greyhound killed the puppy. What the court offered was not mercy so much as a life sentence: Lexus could survive if a concrete enclosure went up in the yard and she spent the rest of her years inside it, released only for medical care. The cost alone made it impossible, among other objections, so the owner turned it down. A euthanasia date was set.
Rosenthal had no animal-law experience and was not licensed in Rhode Island. He built a defense anyway, and Lexus lived. The order that saved her arrived with a sneer attached. As Rosenthal describes it, he was commanded as an officer of the court to retrieve her from animal control and drive her out of Rhode Island, no detours, no coming back, which he calls his first get-out-of-town-by-sundown order. He assumed, he says, that the banishment was meant only for the dog.
That case is now the name on the nonprofit, and the calls have not stopped since.
The work, and the hate mail
Animal law is all he does now. Roughly 30 cases a year come through his Long Island offices, and a good share of them end with a dog going home instead of being put down. He receives hate mail. He has received death threats. He has been pitched reality shows about his caseload and turned them down, on the grounds that the format would not advance the work.
The point he keeps returning to is not that dogs are innocent. It is that they deserve the same care in assigning fault that we give people.
What he argues, in the end, is simple: the law should weigh fault for an animal with the same care it brings to weighing fault for a person.
The law is moving, just unevenly
The encouraging part is that the legal ground under breed-based blame has genuinely shifted.
Roughly 22 states now have preemption laws that stop local governments from passing breed-specific ordinances, according to the Animal Legal & Historical Center’s tracking as of early 2025. About ten of those bar breed distinctions in animal regulation entirely; the rest bar them only within dangerous-dog laws, which is a narrower and weaker protection than it sounds. Denver, which banned Pit Bulls for three decades, ended that ban after a 2020 ballot measure, with a licensed-ownership system taking effect in 2021.
The gap is home rule. In states like Colorado, cities and counties can override state-level anti-BSL protections, which is exactly how breed bans persist in states that nominally prohibit them. Your dog’s legal status can still change when you cross a county line.
What’s new since this was written
The direction of travel is toward judging the dog rather than the breed, and the science keeps supporting it. Large genetics work published in 2022 in Science found that breed explains only a small share of individual behavior differences in dogs, which cuts directly against the assumption that a label on a report predicts what an animal will do.
But it is not one-way. The UK banned the XL Bully type in 2024, adding it to the Dangerous Dogs Act, which shows how quickly breed-based law can come back when a high-profile incident lands in the news cycle.
The practical takeaway for owners has not changed. Know your local ordinance before you need it, keep your vet and training records where you can find them, and if a hearing notice ever arrives, treat it like the property case it legally is, not like a misunderstanding you can talk your way out of.
References
- Rosenthal, R. The Lexus Project. thedoglawyer.com
- Animal Legal & Historical Center. “Overview of States that Prohibit Breed Specific Legislation.” Michigan State University College of Law. animallaw.info
- Animal Legal & Historical Center. “Brief Overview of Dangerous Dog Laws.” Michigan State University College of Law. animallaw.info
- Bathurst, C., et al. “The Problem of Dog-Related Incidents and Encounters.” US Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. PDF
- Lee, C. G. “More than Just Collateral Damage: Pet Shootings by Police.” University of New Hampshire Law Review, Vol. 17. scholars.unh.edu
- Morrill, K., et al. “Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes.” Science, 2022. science.org
Common questions
What is a dangerous dog hearing?
It is usually an administrative or municipal proceeding, not a criminal trial, where a hearing officer decides whether your dog should be labeled dangerous, vicious, or potentially dangerous. Because it is administrative, the formal rules of evidence often do not apply, and hearsay is frequently admitted. A finding can trigger anything from mandatory muzzling and insurance requirements to an order to euthanize.
Do I have any legal rights if my dog is declared dangerous?
Yes. Dogs are legally property, so the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments' due process protections apply to you as the owner. In practice that means you are entitled to notice of the hearing, a real opportunity to see and contest the case against your dog, the ability to present evidence such as vet records, training history, and witness testimony, and in most jurisdictions a right to appeal an adverse ruling.
Why does the larger dog usually get charged after a dog fight?
Because the visible injuries run one direction. A small dog that starts a fight with a big dog is usually the one that ends up hurt, so the bigger dog looks like the aggressor in the incident report. Add breed reputation to that and the larger dog is the one that draws the charge, even when it was defending itself.
Does breed-specific legislation still exist in the US?
Yes, but it is shrinking. Roughly 22 states now have preemption laws that limit or bar local governments from passing breed bans, and cities including Denver have repealed long-standing pit bull bans. Home-rule jurisdictions can still enact breed ordinances in some states, so it varies enormously by ZIP code.
