but it occurs to me that the proliferation (and aggressive defense thereof) of randomly extremely dangerous dogs
might be a useful component of persons desiring to create fear in the general population."
Norski
Posted on 05/18/2018 1:18:15 PM PDT by Norski
Cool, apologies for any confusion.
The problem is that yes, the dog has inherently dangerous physical capacities and is disproportionally owned by people who either want a mean dog or simply don’t understand what training and controlling a powerful, intelligent and strong willed 60-150 pound predator entails.
Sorry I am late to the party. I had to get my tux cleaned.
I myself also am unconvinced -as of yet- that BSL is ideal.
What I am doing here is disseminating what I believe to be the scope of the problem - said problem being the increasing number of deaths, dismemberment, injuries and maulings by the smallest number breed-type category of dog over the last 35 years, said breed-type bred only for an activity illegal in all 50 states of the USA for more than 100 years. Pit-bull-type dogs and dog pit-fighting.
So, other than BSL, what suggestion, solution, or bandaid have you?
I am following the money. I have no solution as yet myself.
Lederhosen, sans leather shorts.
They need to have it bred out of them, like their Bulldog/Boston Terrier/Bull Terrier siblings have.
Not saying it’s easy - but somehow, it happened for those other breeds belonging to the same family.
Stick to AKC show dogs only (StaffBull, AmStaff), and other animals known to have only non-aggressive pedigrees for so many gens. Cull the others out of existence just by attrition. Any time an “incident” occurs, that animal is dead and his offspring must be neutered, etc.
What we need is an American version of the Schaferhunde Verein for PBTs which really keeps a lock on their dogs and owners.
All dog breeds are artificial experiments.
This one has a high lethality quotient.
My condolences...I have a pit too - sweetest animal on the Earth - the only way you could die in her company is to be licked to death.
...bet Norski and the other haters are doing a happy dance, knowing your Baby is suffering.
Well said, Sir.
OKLAHOMA Update: the veterinarian who handled the dogs that killed Tracy Garcia, 52, in Ardmore posted this on the Westwood Veterinary Hospital Facebook page: Westwood Veterinary Hospital, Inc. 3 hrs “We have been receiving a lot of negative messages regarding the breeds of dogs involved in the terrible attack Thursday night. I believe that people are missing the point regarding the breeds of dogs that were involved. A woman died. The dogs appear to me to be a pit bull and 4 pit-bull mix puppies. Who knows what the female was. She looked to me like an Australian Shepherd mixed with something with short legs. It was tragic. The person who made a statement about the breed previously works at the shelter, not here.- Dr. Aldridge” www.facebook.com/westwoodvthosp/?
I very much hope that you both escaped without injury.
The numbers were a shock to me, too. As I read and re-read the way the author gathered the numbers, I came to the conclusion that he may be low in his estimates. This is one of the reasons I am posting these items.
What the hell sort of justification is that—the killed cats are like family members too!
And having such killers in our communities is exactly the sort of thing that local communities should regulate against.
“Stick to AKC show dogs only (StaffBull, AmStaff), and other animals known to have only non-aggressive pedigrees for so many gens. Cull the others out of existence just by attrition. Any time an “incident” occurs, that animal is dead and his offspring must be neutered, etc.”
_________________________________________
Hm. How do you suggest this implemented?
The numbers I have seen are that PBT owners only spay or neuter 20% of their animals, as opposed to 70% of most other breeds.
For all readers of this post, what is Schaferhunde Verien? And would you please explain how it might work in the USA?
When only a small number of breeds are causing the vast majority of the serious injuries and deaths from dog attacks, breed-specific action appears to be called for. I'm not sure that there is a practical way around it.
Unfortunately, the owners of AKC pit bull breeds are not the irresponsible owners who create most of the problems. It is the backyard breeders who are creating most of the pit bulls that are filling the shelters. In this backyard breeder group are that subset of breeders who want to increase, not decrease, the aggressive tendencies of the pit bulls.
Merritt Clifton (removed my suggestion of what you can do with him)
He gets his info from newspaper reports.
He is NOT a researcher.
He is for the abolition of animal husbandry.
He’s a frikken looney toon fanatic.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/merritt-clifton-pit-bulls_b_5866176.html
https://merritcliftondebunked.blogspot.ca/
http://www.swaylove.org/talking-with-merritt-clifton
http://laanimalwatch.blogspot.ca/2008/06/merrit-cliftons-methodology.html
As someone remarked, “ he’s a twit who is trying to fit a half-baked personal belief into pseudo-scientific clothing”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From Merritt Clifton
April 13, 2003
Rachel Kizer
K. Bakeman
c/o Langley Middle School
Dear Mrs. Kizer & Ms. Bakeman:
Wolf has informed us that your classes during the next several weeks have been assigned to raise funds for Heifer Project International, and that a portion of his grade will depend on his participation.
Wolf will not be participating in any activity whatsoever to benefit Heifer Project International, which we view as one of the most ecologically destructive and economically imperialistic projects ever to ravage the Third World in the name of “taking up the white man’s burden”—a concept which was very much on the mind of Indiana farmer and evangelical Christian missionary Dan West when he founded HPI in 1947.
Heifer Project International is still very much an evangelical Christian sectarian organization, as the accompanying HPI bylaws, taken from the 2002 HPI filing of IRS Form 990, make very clear. It is therefore constitutionally questionable whether a public school should be encouraging, let alone coercing students to participate in HPI fundraising regardless of the other issues at hand.
Beyond that, Heifer Project International, as regards trying to eliminate world hunger, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
This is no original insight of mine. Mohandas Gandhi identified rising per capita meat consumption by the rich and middle classes as a major cause of starvation by the poor—and warned that even if the poor could afford to eat meat at the rate of the rich, the earth might not withstand the strain of producing so much grain to feed livestock. Paul Erlich and Frances Moore Lappe warned as far back as the 1960s that U.S.-led efforts to promote more animal husbandry in the underdeveloped world were deeply misguided.
Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation for Economic Trends, Diet For A New America author John Robbins, the late agricultural reform advocate Henry Geiger of the Manas Institute, the Indian agricultural reformer Vandana Shiva, and the late Henry Spira, founder of the Coalition for Nonviolent Food, among many others, have reached similar conclusions.
In 1997 I personally investigated the impact of animal agriculture on the poor, with specific reference to the role of Heifer Project International as one of the most important mechanisms in persuading Third World nations to adopt a meat-centered diet.
My report, The Meat Mob Muscles In, also accompanies this letter, along with various articles summarizing the findings of Rifkin, Robbins, Brown, et al.
Even beyond that report and the other items with it, there are still further points to make—in particular, about the fallacious image that Heifer Project International promotes of livestock farming, quite beyond the fallacy that it is effectively fighting hunger.
Heifer Project International raises funds by appealing to the myth of Old MacDonald’s Farm, where all the animals were supposedly treated kindly, before they were eaten. Recipients of their literature who may know the truth of how nearly 10 billion animals per year are raised and killed for meat in the U.S. (approximately a third of the total global slaughter) are encouraged to believe that Old MacDonald’s Farm may still exist somewhere abroad.
If Old Macdonald’s Farm still exists anywhere, we have not seen it, in visits to rural regions of every continent. But then, it never did—not as city-dwellers imagine it.
I know the actuality of Old Macdonald’s Farm because I lived on such a farm for many years in rural Quebec. I shoveled manure by hand, helped to feed cows, chickens, ducks, sheep, and hogs, chopped firewood with an ax, baled hay, and drank warm milk straight from the milking bucket — and I saw what really went on there, and on all the neighbors’ farms in that then very remote rural community, where many of the old-timers had never traveled more than 50 miles from their birthplace, some still ploughed with horses, and a considerable number were illiterate.
Old MacDonald drowned kittens, shot dogs, chopped the heads off chickens, slashed pigs’ throats, flogged his horses when in a bad mood — and tacked coyotes’ bullet-riddled hides to the barn door, below the deer skulls.
Inheriting the remnants of this barnyard paradise, Old Mac’s sons built pig or chicken factories under contract to conglomerates, or pushed calves into veal crates.
(I stopped drinking milk in 1982 when my stomach rebelled after hearing cows bawl for their calves, as the calves bawled back from the truck taking them away.)
Old Mac probably didn’t intend to be as mean as he was — at least not all of the time — but he really didn’t want to “know better,” and like a lot of other people in traditional cultures, he resisted any effort to persuade him to change his ways.
Old MacDonald’s wife was just as hardened to animal suffering. One of Kim’s most traumatic early memories was of visiting her grandparents in Tennessee and seeing her grandmother wring the neck off a chicken to fry for Sunday dinner — a meal Kim couldn’t stomach.
The sentimentally remembered earth-wisdom of bygone people and times, which Kim and I both saw first-hand, is in truth just a projection of disenchantment with here-and-now. Painfully aware of current atrocities against animals, we wish there was a time when kindness prevailed — a wish as old as the Hebrew story of the Garden of Eden.
Heifer Project International speaks to that wish, while preparing the Third World to accept the advent of the pig and chicken factories that inevitably follow the adoption of greater economic reliance on animal husbandry.
In truth, agriculture in any form that includes killing animals was never kind.
On Old MacDonald’s farm, the process of denial began with encouraging children to hunt and trap, and to bond with animals raised as 4-H projects—animals whom the children were later forced to tearfully sell for slaughter.
That still goes on right here on Whidbey Island, right next door to the Langley Middle School at the county fairgrounds, and should be recognized by now as a form of psychological child abuse.
Elsewhere, the initiation rite is roughing up animals in amateur rodeos. Sometimes that is combined with raising a 4-H animal. Once the child no longer considers animals’ pain, he or she is ready to become a livestock farmer.
Desensitizing methods vary from place to place. Within the Third World they include public rites such as animal sacrifice, still practiced in parts of Africa, India, and elsewhere, bullfighting in Spain, France, and Latin America, and beating, burning, or boiling dogs and cats to death in Korea before eating them, to name just a few of the atrocities we are familiar with.
Around the world, societies that practice animal husbandry are desensitized societies. The abuse of animals inevitably spills over into the treatment of women and children. Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and slavery persist in in many of the very regions that Heifer Project International serves, for example, as extensions of common agricultural practice to those of our own species who are least able to protect themselves.
So what can we do to stop the cruelty where it begins, feed the hungry, and create a happier, healthier, more just world?
I contemplated that question a lot on cold Quebec winter evenings beneath the northern lights, which hinted at miracles but gave no answers. Years would pass before I met Kim and Wolf was born. Together we found our answer, in publishing ANIMAL PEOPLE, creating a global community of people who care about animals and stand up, even in the most difficult and inhospitable places, to oppose all cruelty.
Wolf has been part of our nonprofit work his entire life. Apart from his very valuable contributions as our illustrator, he has contributed art to many other nonprofit projects, including Spay/USA, the International Companion Animal Welfare Conference, the McKee Project in Costa Rica, the Primarily Primates sanctuary, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
~Merritt Clifton
"Around the world, societies that practice animal husbandry are desensitized societies. The abuse of animals inevitably spills over into the treatment of women and children.
Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and slavery persist...as extensions of common agricultural practice
Norski
It fills them with a burning self-righteousness that imbues them with hubris and a belief in their own moral superiority to those that do not see as they do.
If they had integrity, they would be concerned about ALL dog attacks and show concern for ALL dog attack victims.
Instead of demonizing millions of innocent dogs they would be presenting strategies to prevent ALL dog attacks.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated;
but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end
for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
~C.S.Lewis~
See also: Gun grabbers; Sexual Deviants; Liberals; Race mongers; Anti-Fa, EcoFanatics
Thank you for the kind words - Ruby is a sweetheart of a dog like every pit bull I’ve had over the years. Each one is different, but we love them all.
That sword swings both ways. The moral indignation runs deep on the other side, too.
If they had integrity, they would be concerned about ALL dog attacks and show concern for ALL dog attack victims.
How do you know that they don't? Painting with a pretty broad brush there. However, if a large percentage of the serious attacks are done by a select group of breeds which are small percentage of the overall dog population, doesn't common sense suggest that you begin there? (If you don't like Merritt Clifton's information, use CDC statistics - same conclusion.)
Instead of demonizing millions of innocent dogs they would be presenting strategies to prevent ALL dog attacks.
So what are your ideas? If you don't like BSL or other measures, propose better ideas.
a little story... How I got Sam.
Two lady breeders in different provinces worked together on breeding and vetting potential owners.
One time it came to pass that each thought the other had vetted the buyer.
Very quickly they realized their mistake and one woman drove 3 hours to the new owners to check out the situation.
When she arrived there she found the dog tied up outside next to a dog house and discovered the owner had named the dog, Korrupt.
She took the dog away with her.
Can you imagine how that dog's life would have been and how he would have turned out if he had been doomed to stay with that owner?
I was a co-worker of and later a boarder at that lady's house and had lots of contact with the four resident dogs, one of whom was the newly returned dog.
I loved the dogs. More affectionate, playful and intelligent dogs I had never met.
To me, they were Amstaffs not 'pitbulls', as the lady told me some referred to them. She educated me as to what potential problems owners might face and how to avoid them.
I was at a point in my life where I had cast off old destructive habits and was blossoming into a world now full of wonderful possibilities.
One of those possibilities I realized when the dog was brought back, was that I was now responsible enough to own a dog.
I asked her if I could have the returned dog and she agreed.
I immediately got rid of the 'Korrupt' moniker and named him after my recently departed Dad, Sam.
His CKC registered name became Barbary Coast Destiny's Delight... named so for the breeder's kennel and for my new grand-daughter Destiny.
He came to work with me every day as I shortly after closed my electronics sale and service business and concentrated solely on being an independent courier broker.
He met all kinds of folks while doing his job and was a wonderful ambassador for the breed.
I was into my 50s and I wanted to something I loved, canoeing, while I was young enough to still do it.
Sam and I took weeks and months off during the summer to head into Northern Ontario for wilderness canoeing.
He soon became comfortable in the canoe and we had wonderful adventures together.
We had rides in helicopter and float planes, got stuck once on a rock in the middle of the White River and its strong current.
I threw my gear out and jumped into the water to guide it to shore.
Sam, who when he first got introduced to canoeing would jump out at the first indication we had rubbed up against something,
was still sitting in the canoe, stuck in the middle of a powerful river.
I called him to come and he jumped out and paddle to me and, in one of the neatest things I've ever seen, began nosing the floating gear towards the shore.
He was helping me out!
He was a wonderful dog for canoeing, his short hair dried out quickly which avoided getting the tent and sleeping bags wet.
He was so at home in the canoe...
Anyway, I promised a short story so I better ended it here but there are so many more stories to tell and photos to share.
It is hard to deal with fanatic haters, particularly as I approach the first anniversary of the death of my four-legged companion and wondrous gift from my Creator.
....but it's best not to respond with hatred but with love.
As long as the present incarnation of Chet/Wristpin/ambrose/dogsbite.org/Merrit Clifton continues posting I'm going to do my best to respond with love...
...and I have 100s of love photos to share and dozens of love stories to tell.
I will use the opportunity the fanatic haters provide to show them what they are apparently incapable of seeing or caring about...the other side. The joy I will recall will offset somewhat the sadness of losing him.
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