For two decades, pit bulls have been public enemy #1 in Denver. But maybe it's time for a recount.

"It's one of the oldest and one of the worst," Paula Terifaj says of Denver's ban. "It's failed." A veterinarian from California who helped organize the protest, she makes no effort to hide her disgust with the city. Terifaj helps run the website DenverKillsDogs.com, which has posted billboards across town in hopes of shaming officials into loosening their strict enforcement of the ordinance, if not dropping the ban altogether.

But the lack of local voices is a major hurdle for breed-ban opponents. When Denver's ordinance was passed twenty years ago, any pit bulls already living in the city were grandfathered in, as long as their owners registered the dogs and had them tattooed with registration numbers; obtained $100,000 in liability insurance; installed eight-foot-high fences around their property and posted them with signs reading "PIT BULL DOG"; and muzzled their dogs when off the property. (If any of these grandfathered-in dogs had puppies, the law stated that they had to be removed from the city or "relinquished to the Animal Shelter for destruction.") Some 300 pit bulls were registered and allowed to remain in Denver, but by 2003, all of these dogs had died, closing the door on any legal reason for a pit bull to set paw in Denver.

Heidi Tufto moved out of Denver after one of her pit bulls was impounded. See more photos from inside "Pit Bull Row" on the Latest Word.

Doug Kelley is head of Denver Animal Care and Control.

Details

Related: Boulder takes a bite out of bad dog behavior. Also: See photos from Pit Bull Row and more on Kiernan Maletsky contributed to the research for this story.

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• Kevin O'Connell
• Wilbur Billingsley
• Portland (Oregon)
• Pets
• Dogs

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Except for this original grandfather clause, under the ordinance owners whose dogs are found to be pit bulls have three choices: They can let their pets be euthanized by the city, they can send their dogs outside of the city — or they can leave Denver with their dogs. The ordinance even bars non-profit animal shelters such as MaxFund and the Denver Dumb Friend's League from accepting or adopting out pit bulls. Since 1992, the city has impounded 5,286 pit bulls.

Heidi Tufto was walking her pit bull in a park in west Denver in 2002 when a police van pulled up. Officers held her at gunpoint while animal control chased down her dog, she remembers: "There was this old Polish lady who saw the whole thing happen, and she was screaming at them, 'Gestapo! Gestapo!' in her thick accent. Which almost made me want to laugh because it was all so crazy. But at the same time, it was terrifying. They called my dog vicious because it was freaking out. But any dog would freak out in that situation." After securing her dog's release, Tufto, an Army staff sergeant, flew it out of state on a military transport, and she soon moved out of Denver herself. "I couldn't stay; it's like a police state," she says. Today she lives in Byers and is an outspoken activist against Denver's ban.

No matter where a pit bull caused trouble, each episode tightened enforcement in Denver. In 2003, a 41-year-old woman tending to her friend's horses on a farm in Elbert County was mauled to death by three roving pit bulls. The terrifying attack was covered extensively by the national media. Kelley says that calls to animal control of possible pit bulls in Denver jumped 50 percent. Then-state representative Debbie Stafford pushed through legislation to strengthen Colorado's dangerous-dog laws. "The initial intent was to make sure that pet owners are held legally responsible on first bite," says Stafford. But in the process of speaking with animal experts, she and her co-sponsor added a provision that would prevent local governments from having breed-specific regulations. Governor Bill Owens quickly signed the bill into law.

But Denver filed suit just as quickly, with city council instructing the city attorney's office to sue the state on the grounds that the Colorado constitution protects the ability of a home-rule municipality to create and maintain its own laws. Although a Denver District Court judge agreed with Denver on the home-rule issue, he allowed the Colorado Attorney General's Office to pursue its argument that, in the fourteen years since the Colorado Dog Fanciers decision, new research on dog bites and attacks could be presented as proof that pit bull bans are irrational.

Assistant City Attorney Kory Nelson argued Denver's case, saying the ban was justified not necessarily because evidence showed that pit bulls bite more frequently, but because the history and physiological traits of the breed make pit bulls more likely to cause severe injury and death if they do bite, comparing pit bull attacks to shark bites.

In April 2005, the judge ruled that the state had failed to prove that Denver had no rational basis for prohibiting pit bulls. The ban would stay.

Denver had suspended enforcement of the ordinance while it took the fight to court, and during the year it took for the lawsuit to play out, hundreds of pit bulls were brought back into Denver. Now officials sent letters to known pit bull owners, informing them that enforcement would begin again in two months. The day after that deadline, animal control vans with police backup spread across the city, rounding up dozens of the dogs. Others were dropped off at the shelter by owners who didn't want to run afoul of the law. In 2005 and 2006, more than 1,900 pit bulls were impounded in the city animal shelter, and 1,453 of them were put down.