Dog Fight

Back in February 1989, a 7-year-old girl named Melissa Moreira was walking home on SW 18th Terrace near FIU after a night of shopping with her family when a neighbor's pit bull ran at her and leapt. The dog tore apart the girl's face and arms as she screamed. It then savaged her mother and grandmother before a neighbor shot it four times in the head.

Laura Massa

Dahlia Canes rescues a pit bull named Diva from Animal Services.

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More About

• Sara Pizano
• Melissa Moreira
• Adam Goldfarb
• Pets
• Dogs

The animal left the girl in critical condition. She survived only after extensive reconstructive surgery to her face.

Soon after that attack, Miami-Dade banned all pit bulls. It was probably the first such countywide measure in the nation. Since then, thousands of the breed have been killed in a drab building near the Palmetto Expressway. In 2008, the county confiscated 802 pit bulls and euthanized more than 650.

Neither Broward nor Palm Beach has such a ban — and dozens of dog owners have fled there with their dogs just to avoid the law. Though national animal groups from the Humane Society of the United States to the American Veterinary Medical Association oppose the ban, workers every month halt scores of animals' hearts with an overdose of barbiturates and then cart them en masse out the back door.

But thanks to a minuscule 57-year-old woman with a short haircut and a paw print tattooed on her left wrist, that may soon change. Dahlia Canes led a group that won an unprecedented legal victory this past March. And now she has hired a lawyer and plans to mount a lawsuit that just might overturn the measure. "The ban doesn't work," she says. "It's insane that we're taking them away and killing them."

The catchall term pit bull actually refers to at least three common breeds of dog — the American pit bull terrier, the American Staffordshire terrier, and the Staffordshire bull terrier. All three probably descended from bulldogs bred in England in the 1800s for "bull baiting" — brutal bull versus canine blood matches. When the sport was banned in the 1830s, the hardy animals were bred for dog fights instead.

Hundreds came to America with Irish and English immigrants later in the century. By the early 1900s, pit bulls were among the nation's most popular breeds. The Little Rascals' dog, Petey, was a pit bull. So was Sgt. Stubby, a beloved WWI mascot that earned dozens of medals in the European trenches with the 102nd Infantry.

Pit bulls didn't become pariahs until the past two decades, when well-publicized, stomach-churning attacks such as the one on Melissa Moreira led to anti-pit bull laws. Miami's ban was championed by then Metro-Dade Commissioner Joe Gersten — who famously later fled to Australia after he was caught frolicking with prostitutes in a crack house. It passed 6 to 0 on April 4, 1989, after Moreira's mother tearfully asked commissioners: "Who in this room is going to bring my child back to the way she was?"

But it didn't take long for the law's problems to become obvious.

One owner chained 16 pit bulls to a tree in a Miramar field and left them to starve rather than face the $500 fine for each dog. A month after the ban was approved, the Miami Herald — which initially supported the law — wrote a scathing editorial demanding its repeal. The next year, Florida's legislature passed a statewide prohibition against "breed-specific" dog laws. Miami-Dade's rule, however, was grandfathered in.

The law has plenty of supporters, including PETA. In 2001, the Centers for Disease Control reported pit bulls had killed 66 people in the '80s and '90s, twice as many as any other kind of dog.

But that statistic is nonsense, says Adam Goldfarb, a Humane Society spokesman. No one has shown that breed-wide bans reduce pit bull assaults. He contends the laws are expensive and almost impossible to enforce. Thousands of pit bull owners flaunt the law every day just by walking their dogs in Miami-Dade. "We don't believe any one breed of dog is inherently more dangerous than any other breed," Goldfarb says.

Miami's ban has met its most ardent — and dangerous — critic in Canes. She fled to Miami in 1959 with her family at age 6 when her father, a member of deposed dictator Fulgenicio Batista's regime, was forced from Cuba. Her love for animals goes back to her homeland, where she once spent her $12 allowance on a mule.

In 2003, while driving on NW 32nd Avenue, the paralegal spotted a stray dog. When she opened the door, the chocolate-colored mutt leapt into the car and laid its head on Canes's lap. Though a friend in the back seat shouted, "Watch out — it's a pit bull!" Canes was in love.

But soon Animal Services discovered Chocolate, as she named the female hound. Canes sent the dog to live in Broward and began her quest to overturn the pit bull ban.

Since then, Canes has adopted dozens of pit bulls and found homes for them in Broward or other places where the canines are legal.

She has also met people like Pierre Bahri, who move north to save their pit bulls. Bahri, an art gallery worker, packed up in December after an Animal Control officer gave him 48 hours to remove two pit bulls from his Wynwood home. He broke his lease and moved to Hollywood. "I love my dogs like they're my kids," he says.