Livermore, CA Animal Ordinances: Breed Restrictions (2026)

California Food and Agricultural Code § 31683 sets the outer limit on what any California city, including Livermore, may do with breed-specific dog rules. The section lets a city or county adopt its own potentially-dangerous-or-vicious-dog program, incorporate all, part or none of the state chapter, punish a violation as a misdemeanor, or write a stricter program than the state's, but it then adds a flat restriction: 'no program regulating any dog shall be specific as to breed,' except for the narrow carve-out in Health and Safety Code § 122331.

That carve-out, added by the same 2005 bill (Stats. 2005, Ch. 668), permits a city or county to enact a breed-specific ordinance only for mandatory spay-or-neuter programs and breeding requirements, and expressly forbids declaring any specific breed, or mixed breed, potentially dangerous or vicious under that narrower ordinance. A jurisdiction that adopts a breed-specific spay/neuter program under § 122331(a) must also track its effect: subsection (b) requires it to compile dog-bite statistics by severity, breed, whether the dog was altered, and whether the breed was covered by the program, and to report those numbers to the State Public Health Veterinarian every quarter.

030, implements the state's potentially-dangerous-and-vicious-dog framework (Food & Agric. Code §§ 31601-31683) using behavior-based criteria, such as an unprovoked bite or attack, rather than a breed list, which keeps the city's program inside the § 31683 limits. The Legislature's own findings in § 31601 frame the whole chapter as a response to a 'serious and widespread threat' from dangerous dogs that local law alone could not adequately regulate, which is why the state, not any single city, sets the breed-neutrality floor.