Letters to the Editor
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folks are in denial
And Santa Claus is true if you just believe hard enough. My Australian Shepherd is hard wired to herd and guard "our farm". He demonstrates this every day and trying to break him would be a pretty tall order. No different then dogs that were bred to hunt, protect, or in this case FIGHT... HELLO PEOPLE... Of course, the only two dogs that have gone after my playful dog have been... you name it... pit bulls.
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Follow-up on today's pit bull attack story
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/08/23/chetry.gorman.pit.bull.attack.cnn
Here the victim speaks, and you can get an idea of the kind of damage she sustained. It really needs no further elaboration from me!
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Celebrity-Owned Pit Bulls
I wanted to mention another lovely celebrity pit bull that I met. The musician and actor Levon Helm (formerly of The Band) has a beautiful chocolate brown pit bull named Muddy, named after Muddy Waters.
About once a month, Mr. Helm opens up his in-home studio, on a wooded lot in Woodstock, NY, to the public for a concert. My husband and I attended one of these concerts last year, and met Muddy in the parking lot, where he was given free rein and was calmly meeting and greeting everyone that arrived. This included several children, who, as children are wont to do, immediately were hugging and fawning all over him. No one appeared to be too bothered by his breed. I must say he was one of the calmest and most mellow dogs I have ever met!
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So a dog attacked someone, is the sky falling?
BREAKING NEWS!! THIS JUST IN!!
SOMETIMES DOGS ATTACK PEOPLE! AAAAAAAAAAAAND... THEY HAVE BEEN DOING IT FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS!!!
c[_] <- Care cup. it's empty. Making certain breeds illegal will amount to nothing but wasted tax dollars and unintended consequences.
If pits were illegal then just say your dog isn't a pit but a "mixed breed" or a mutt. Disagree about the breed of the dog? Prove it. It isn't like the dog will be registered, it can be whatever breed you want to call it. Get a "pit" from the local papers, just call it a "powerbreed mix" or some other buzzword that the public will translate into "pit". What is the state going to do? Kill all mixed breed dogs that might have some pitbull in them? Regulate how people can advertise unregistered puppies they are trying to sell in the newspaper? I'm sure the state would have no problems doing that though, since it kills thousands of dogs regularly.
I can see these proposals translating into money well spent... All so we can protect some lady who might be the victim of a freak dog attack that probably has a probability of occurring somewhere around 0.000002
Anyone who thinks that behavior regulation via the State can make everyone peaceful and happy and provide you with 100% safety then you are living in a fantasy world, or at least a world I wouldn't want any part of. The slight probability of a dog breaking into my house or the house of some random lady who doesn't secure her property, or a prowler shooting me, is not worth giving up freedoms and choices to the Government. And here I always thought that the Liberal Left were the ones against limiting "choice", or does having choices outside of coercive limitations imposed by the state only matter when it involves some woman's snizz?
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I guess
the answer is that we should all have pepper spray on our person 24/7.
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At the very least, know what you own.
What surprises me most about the pro-pit bull posts above, is that very few of them acknowledge that a pit bull bite is much more severe than the average cocker spaniel bite. Any dog can bite. All dogs can bite. Maybe they'll bite only once in their lives, or maybe not at all - but it can happen. And to say, "all these stories about permanently disabled or dead persons, they concern badly trained dogs", is denying a very real risk. I'm not at all sure that most pit bull casualties are caused by thuggish owners - that may simply be a media bias (consider that 80% of serious dog bites come from dogs the victim is familiar with, usually belonging to friends or family). There have been complaints about media bias, but how about a different kind of media bias, the one that focuses on thuggish owners and under-reports the you-and-I type of owners? Would your local newspaper report as extensively on a child-biting dog owned by a sweet grandmama, as on one owned by a cocaine dealer? I don't think so. If it's fair to say, "thugs give a bad name to pit bulls", maybe it's also fair to say, "pit bulls give a bad name to thugs". (And I'm not saying this to provoke angry reactions.)
All dog owners routinely accept the risk that their dogs will bite someone, even if it's never happened before, and all persons (especially those outside the dog master's direct family) who associate with dogs take a risk too. But the risk is not so large, because a dogbite is generally not so serious. And that is where pit bulls and other fight dogs are different.
Who poses a greater danger to my children, a well-meaning owner who says, "You can play with my pit bull, he's harmless", or a thug I can avoid by crossing the street? I think the former. And that is where I think that Ken Foster's article is absolutely wrong. I don't mind responsible people owning a pit bull. But someone who thinks his pit bull is less dangerous than a chihuahua, is not a responsible person.
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What a racist!
I don't know if anyone else noticed this in the article - there are far too many letters on this article for me to check - but what exactly did the author mean by this comment:
"There's only one kind of person who owns a pit bull," these people say, and often I imagine that the person they are thinking of is poor and black.
This comes right after this line:
Pit bulls, to them, are ghetto trash, drug dealers' props, trailer park ornaments, symbols of desperation and anger.
So according to him, "ghetto trash", "drug dealers" and "trailer park" denizens are, by definition, "poor and black". Nice.
But then again, maybe I'm wrong about him. He did say that he imagined the OTHER people thinking that. So maybe it's not HIM that is the racist, but THEM. Yeah, that's the ticket.
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I feel
pit bull/pit bull mix/rottie owners should not mind muzzling and keeping their dogs on leashes in public, as well as other strict laws regarding escape-proof fencing/licensing etc., since these dog breeds have been proven to cause an overwhelming number of the serious bites/fatalities. If these owners truly care about their breeds, that is. If there were enough responsible and caring owners, you'd think some of them would be pushing for some sort of laws in an effort to reduce the number of bad, irresponsible and downright cruel owners of their chosen breed. Perhaps some of these enthusiastic owners with well-socialized dogs could think of good ideas, however, I don't hear many coming from them in this discussion. All I hear is how great and well-behaved their dogs are, but it seems like it is mainly the badly-socialized, badly-supervised dogs that we have to worry about, especially those allowed to escape from their owner's property.
However, I doubt these owners will want any changes made. I guess the want of the individual triumphs over the safety of society.
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Criminal liability is not enough
Two pit bulls with idiot owners terrorized my neighborhood for 6 weeks. They kept getting loose. It took over 40 complaints and another 2 weeks to get these two aggressive animals taken away from the owners. In that time period, they had two stare downs with kids, chased several people with smaller dogs, etc.
The locla laws allow fines, not jail time.
Now the same idiots have what appears to be a 3-5 month old pit puppy, just 2 weeks after the others were taken away. In a good neighborhood with multiple new babies and numerous kids. Kids at the ones most likely to be killed in such an attack.
Several of my neighbors have bought handguns. The vigilante option is faster and to be honest, much easier. It seems that there are very few responsible owners; most owners seem to be of the "hardass" variety, not the responsible variety. Unless the good owners can think of a way to control the damage done by the more numerous jerk owners, the good owners appear much less persuasive.
My questions to the people fighting breed specific bans (good owners) are this:
Do you prefer that we shoot the dog, or that a ban allow the police to confiscate the dogs from the idiots who do this? It's not the dog's fault, but they don't let us shoot the owners. Or will the good owners back criminal liability and greater powers for the police to confiscate dogs from irresponsible owners more quickly?
How do we discourage the idiots from owning bully dogs if not through regulation?