Gepetto lives under canine house arrest.

The 1-year-old male pit bull, a resident of the 700 block of Lyon Street in North Lawrence, must be kept in a locked pen and can’t leave home without a muzzle. The dog’s vital information is contained in a city registry, and implanted under the fatty skin on the back of the dog’s neck is an ID microchip the size of an uncooked grain of rice.

The reason for these precautions is that early Tuesday morning, Gepetto slipped the bounds of his owners’ property and sunk his teeth into the hind quarters of Stormin’ Norman, a Yorkshire terrier who lives a block away and had been on a walk with his owner, Barbara Haller.

Haller said a friend with whom she was walking had to beat Gepetto with a rock to separate the two dogs.

“I have never in my life seen a dog so aggressive,” said Haller, 61. “He just ran over and attacked him. My Yorkie was looking at me like, ‘Mama, do something!’ He was helpless.”

Now, Haller and another neighbor, Scott Wagner, are raising concerns about the property where Gepetto lives. Both neighbors say there’s been a pattern of loose pit bulls coming from the Rayton home, a two-acre plot of land next to Lyon Park.

“We used to take stroller and bicycle walks down Lyon Street in front of their house,” said Wagner, a legal assistant with the city’s Legal Services Department. “We do not do that anymore because of their pit bulls.”

Charles and Loretta Rayton, however, say Gepetto is getting a bad rap.

“That dog is not vicious,” said Charles Rayton, 53.

From left, Amika Rayton, 3, Tyrone Rayton, and Traci Dotson, 6, play with their pit bull Gepetto at the Rayton home. Gepetto recently was declared a vicious dog after attacking a Yorkshire terrier. The Raytons contend the dog is not vicious and gets a bad name because some people train pit bulls to be fighters.

They say Gepetto is friendly enough to allow young children to climb on his back and ride him like a horse. They say he’s a family pet, not a fighter.

“We all love him,” said Loretta Rayton, 44.

The Raytons keep horses on their property and have, in the past, had as many as three or four dogs living on the land at one time. They’ve had rottweilers, labs, mutts and, yes, pit bulls used for breeding.

Gepetto technically belongs to Loretta’s 23-year-old son, Mike Johnson, an over-the-road truck driver. The dog came from the litter of another of Johnson’s pit bulls, she said.

“He just kept one of them, and the rest he sold,” she said.

“He does not fight his dogs,” Charles Rayton said. “People think just because you’ve got one, you fight them.”

Loretta Rayton acknowledged that Gepetto shouldn’t have been loose in the first place the other day, but she said it was a one-time occurrence.

“I guess he figured out how to get up on the dog house and jump over the fence,” she said. “We’re trying to take precautions where he doesn’t get out again.”

¢ 6News video: Yorkshire terrier attacked by pit bull (7-15-03)

After a hearing this week in Lawrence Municipal Court, Gepetto was labeled a “dangerous dog” under city ordinance, which places strict handling and registration duties on the dog’s owner. According to city statistics, six dogs — one basenji, one German shepherd, one English boxer, and three pit bulls — have received the “dangerous dog” label so far this year.

Wagner said he didn’t think of the escape as an isolated event. He said he’d seen dogs from the Rayton home being walked without a leash, and that about a year ago he found one of their pit bulls in his garage.

He closed the garage door, shutting the dog inside, and called an animal control officer, who returned the dog to the Raytons.

“Every time I’ve talked to them, they’ve seemed reasonable, but at the same time, they fail to keep their animals on their property,” Wagner said.

The Raytons said that if Gepetto were any breed of dog other than a pit bull, people wouldn’t be so upset.

“I think it’s just the reputation of the pit bull,” Loretta Rayton said. “They are not like people think they are.”