Official here will vote next month on whether to rescind its decades-old pit bull ban.

The council introduced an ordinance Wednesday which lift the town’s ban on the pit bull dog breed.

If passed by the council at its July 5 meeting, it would no longer be illegal to own or possess a pit bull in Lake Arthur.

“When the pit bull ordinance was passed 20 years ago, pit bulls were purebred dogs for the most part,” Mayor Poncho Lejeune said. “It was very easy for a cop to identify a pit bull because they were pit bulls. Now everybody cross breeds them and the way our ordinance read if the dog has any pit bull it could be illegal. How are we going to prove a dog is 10 percent pit bull? The town would have to DNA test every dog in town. It’s just become an ordinance that is impossible to enforce.”

Pit bulls will remain illegal until the ordinance is passed next month.

Lejeune said the town already has a vicious dog ordinance in place.

“So if a pit bull is vicious, the (police) chief is going to pick it up,” Lejeune said. “If a Labrador is vicious. If a Chihuahua is vicious, I don’t care which one it is, we have a law that covers that.”

The town adopted an ordinance in 2004 making it illegal to own or posses a pit bull in Lake Arthur. The ban made after a child was mauled in the face by a pit bull while attempting to retrieve a basketball from a yard and a dog was fatally attacked by a pit bull.

Police Chief Jered Thomas said whenever a vicious dog is picked up, the owner will not get the dog back.

“Whenever we deem that dog a vicious dog, you will not get that dog back,” Thomas said. “That dog will be done away with.”

Thomas said if a dog is loose and tries to come at, attack or bite someone, it will be deemed vicious.

“If it comes or tries to come at us, we can actually by law put that dog down right then and there,” Thomas said. “But we really, truly try our best not to kill any dogs.”

Thomas said dogs in general have gotten out of hand in Lake Arthur.

“For months now we have done nothing but become the dog police and we have done nothing but police dogs,” he said. “We are trying to veer from that. You can’t ever control that.”