No More Dogs in My Old Kentucky Home
By Cindy Cooke, Legislative Specialist
reprinted with author's permission from UKC Bloodlines Magazine
On Wednesday morning, December 20, 2006 at 3:45 a.m., the Louisville City Council passed the most controversial animal ordinance in the city's history. The ordinance is 91 pages long and was vigorously opposed by every dog organization in the region. How did this happen in a region known for its dedication to animal husbandry in the horse industry? It's a long, sad story.
Like so many bad laws in recent times, it started with a dog attacking a child. In this case, the child was killed by her family's dog. This incident was followed almost immediately by a fatal attack on an elderly man by two dogs as he walked home from work. Since all of the dogs involved in these two attacks were alleged to have been "pit bulls," the Louisville ordinance started as, you guessed it, a breed-specific dangerous dog law. This was certainly a bad solution to the problem of dog bites, but in the interim between the dog attacks and the passage of the bill, it morphed into one of the most
restrictive dog ownership laws in the country-without, however, any breed specific restrictions. How did this happen?
To understand this story, we have to go back to 2005 when the city of Louisville decided that their Animal Services department needed a radical overhaul. To that end, they hired the first veterinarian in the department's history to serve as director of Animal Services. The man they hired was Dr. Gilles Meloche. And it was to Dr. Meloche that Councilwoman Cheri Bryan Hamilton turned to draft an ordinance to address what she perceived as a "pit bull" problem in her community.
Dr. Meloche's first efforts immediately drew fire from the responsible dog owners of Louisville. For most of the year, dog breeders and owners tried to reason with Dr. Meloche and Councilwoman Hamilton, to no avail. The ordinance went through revision after revision, but without any real compromise from Dr. Meloche's camp. He and Councilwoman Hamilton ignored every effort by the dog community to help produce a pet- and breeder-friendly ordinance. Each revision (and there were at least 11 of them) was as bad as the last.
To understand Dr. Meloche's resistance to working with the dog community, it helps to know a little about his background. Meloche began his career as a teen-aged dairy farmer in Quebec, Canada, after he was forced to leave school when his father had an accident. In 1982, he entered Montreal University where he studied veterinary medicine. He graduated in 1986, and that July became director and owner of the De la Cit‚ Veterinary Hospital, also in Quebec.
In 1995, Meloche pleaded guilty to an administrative charge of failing to keep adequate records for a controlled substance and failure to write a suitable veterinary prescription. His veterinary license was revoked and he was fined.
For the next four years, Meloche taught at College Lionel-Groulx in Sainte-Therese, Quebec, while he earned an MBA from Concordia University. He left his job and was out of work until March 2001, when he was hired as the animal control administrator for the city of Durham, NC. He was fired from that job after only 10 months.
According to the chair of the Durham County Animal Control Advisory Committee, Dr. Meloche had a controlling personality: "Part of the problem is that he would get, I don't want to say a loose cannon, he'd get an idea stuck in his brain and there was no way to shake it out of him."
In February 2002, Dr. Meloche moved to Florida where he became director of the Tallahassee-Leon Community Animal Services Center. By this time, Dr. Meloche had an American veterinary license which, combined with his MBA, made him desirable candidate for the job. Given a mandate to reduce euthanasia statistics, Dr. Meloche took this opportunity to impose his no-kill philosophy. The shelter soon filled up and eventually reached near double capacity. Shelter workers finally complained that animals were dying in their cages and that the facility reeked of urine and feces. As one worker put it, "We all thought he was going to be the breath of fresh air we were looking for. Gradually it became a nightmare."
Even Dr. Meloche's supporters felt that his plan for Tallahassee was unrealistic. Dr. Meloche says of his time in Tallahassee: "I did a fantastic job." A July 2005 audit of that Tallahassee facility, however, found that overcrowding had led to inhumane conditions and that the overcrowding was a direct result of Meloche's no-kill policy.
Meloche arrived in Louisville in 2005, and Councilwoman Hamilton's request for a new animal control ordinance was like manna from heaven. Here was a real opportunity for him to put the "CONTROL" in animal control. But why would he think that Louisville would provide a friendly environment for such a draconian bill?
For starters, the Mayor has pledged to build a new shelter and added $100,000 to the city budget to train and hire new shelter employees. For another, the Kentucky Humane Society and the Shamrock Foundation, a Louisville-based charity devoted to reducing pet overpopulation, both supported him. So Meloche must have been surprised when his first draft was greeted with a howl of protest from every dog organization in Kentucky. As he had in the past, however, Dr. Meloche remained uncompromising in his determination to exert near total control over pet ownership in his dominion.
By September 2006, the ordinance had been redrafted nine times. At that point, the American Veterinary Medical Association sent a letter opposing the breed-specific aspects of the ordinance. After yet another amendment, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife weighed in to explain how the proposed ordinance would harm hunters. Still, Dr. Meloche stood his ground. The ordinance continued to be revised right up until the start of the December 19 council meeting.
The meeting lasted until 3:45 a.m., with opponents arguing that the council should not vote on a bill that none of them except its author had even read in its entirety. In the end, however, party loyalty trumped reason. All of the Democrats on the council voted for the ordinance and all of the Republicans opposed it. And that, as they say, was that.
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