Posted on 05/11/2005 5:21:38 AM PDT by MississippiMasterpiece
It has to be one of the dumbest laws, ever. And I don't even own or like pit bulls. It's nothing personal, only that I'd never keep any animal that eats as much or more than I do.
Still, I can weep for the pit bulls of Denver, particularly for the puppies that never did anything other than get born into the breed.
Yet here we have the city of Denver, newly sprung from legislative and judicial restraint, rounding up pits over the past couple of days and killing them like rats during The Plague.
A uniformed officer arrives at a home. "I'll get him," she announces to her partner. Rather than fight it all, a distraught man emerges, weighs going to jail and a fine, and in the end hands over his dog.
"I'm definitely sad," he later tells a reporter. "He's like a member of my family."
Later in the day, a woman pleads: "I don't have no dogs!
"There ain't no dogs in the basement!" she yells as the uniformed man and woman, responding to an informant's report of a pit bull, interrogate her. Outside, squad cars filled with police officers wait to see if they are needed.
"I'm just doing my job," the woman officer later laments.
It has been eight years since I last had a dog, God rest him. And the one thing I truly know is I would have never given him over to the dogcatcher to be killed simply because he was a beagle.
I would hardly care if a judge in the city where I lived said it was the rule and the law. Yet this has been happening since Monday in Denver, when a state law prohibiting bans of "breed-specific" dogs was overturned and the city's moratorium on pit bull confiscation and killing was lifted.
And no one much is saying a thing.
It is why we need to speak with William Suro. He is a veterinarian of 45 years, who in 1988 started the MaxFund, a nonprofit that provides medical care for injured animals with no known owners, which seeks new homes for them.
It is a shelter that has never killed a single dog.
Bill Suro, 69, for years has wrangled with Denver in the courts of legal and public opinion over the ban, passed in the wake of the pit bull killing of a young child.
"Unfair. Stupid," Bill Suro says of this week's roundup. "It remains an emotional response to a terrible thing that happened, but one that doesn't really help those hurt or killed by vicious dogs."
Bill Suro is a blunt-spoken and uncompromising defender of animals, and a man who believes in harsh punishment for those who abuse and kill them.
He has in recent hours counseled numerous terrier owners, given the shock of their lives simply because their pets resemble pits and were threatened with euthanasia. Denver animal control authorities acknowledge receiving and being sent on numerous "could be a pit bull" calls.
"It makes me and every animal lover and organization across this country just sick," he said. "It's crazy."
He and his wife, Nanci, over the past few months have emptied MaxFund of every pit bull they once housed, shipping them to like-minded shelters outside of Denver.
He puts the number at close to 20 pit bulls. Some owners, too, have come to MaxFund, only to be turned away. He and Nanci, he said, have done all they could.
"We would absolutely love to be the Underground Railroad for pit bulls, but we know the city would close us down."
Yes, I tell him, but aren't pit bulls actually the human flesh-ripping monsters they are portrayed to be?
Bill Suro snickers at my naivete.
"I've been a veterinarian for 45 years, and I've never once been attacked or bitten by a pit bull. There are other breeds where I have gone into an examination room and really been on my guard. I will not tell you which, but they scare me."
Cities like Denver, he says, whip up pit bull hysteria. And that is all it is, he said. People now all believe every pit bull "is a coiled and snarling attacker. It's nonsense."
Cities, he said, would be much better served if they took a simple look at canine attacks from recent years.
"Eighty percent all fatal attacks in the U.S. are caused by male dogs. I guess, given this, it would be prudent to now ban all breeds of male dogs."
Denver, he said, does not at the same time send dogcatchers to cite owners of non-neutered dogs,
"It should know there have been fatal attacks in the U.S. by Pomeranians, that half a dozen attacks that caused death or serious injuries were by cocker spaniels."
And then he raises an issue I had not contemplated, and which I do not lend much credence to. But I will give him his say because it matches what has happened the last two days in the city:
"There appears a racial end of this," Bill Suro says.
"Look at the dogs that have been impounded, and the surnames of their owners. . . . They aren't killing dogs from Cherry Creek. They pick on the easiest people to pick on, the ones who give up easiest," he said, adding that he has forwarded this claim to the American Civil Liberties Union.
What happens, I ask, when all of the Denver pit bulls have been rounded up and put down?
He would not want to be a Malamute, he said.
A male Malamute attacked and killed a 7-year-old girl in Fruita last Saturday night.
"It is not the breed," an unsmiling Bill Suro said.
Not necessarily. Man has inalienable rights which no law may legitimately restrict or deny. Owning animals is not among those inalienable rights, however.
Bingo! We have a winner!
You may be old enough to remember back in the 50s and 60s when the hoods' dog of choice was the German Shepherd Dog. They beat them and fed them red pepper to "make them mean."
In the 70s, every thug and thug wannabe got a Dobermann and abused the heck out of them. Just about ruined a very nice if somewhat high-strung breed.
Then it was Rottweilers.
Now it's "pit bulls" . . . or "pit bull types". Their jaws do not "lock", they are not more "powerful" than many other large dogs, and they are not more human-aggressive than many other breeds. Even the old Staffordshire terrier, back in the days when dogfighting was legal in America and England, was not bred for human aggression because the handlers were in the pit with the dogs.
It's the thug owners that are training these dogs to be human-aggressive, the same way they did with all those other breeds in the past.
Is a hit piece based on pseudoscience.
I don't either, with one caveat:
The owner either surrenders the dog or takes it to the vet within ten days to get it neutered.
Stop the breeding of pit bulls!
OK. But, it can stated that all laws are the result of the will of the people because we have elected those who have enacted the laws.
But, then Rowe V Wade is the law of the land.........
My mom did have to get rid of him or the post office said that they would have him put down. He made a handicapped boy in another town extremely happy.
I would certainly support a control regime where the owners were held responsible for the actions of their dogs on a first-degree (premeditated) basis, e.g., if a dog attacks someone, the owner should be charged with first-degree assault; if it kills someone, it's first-degree murder. But such a solution would never find majority support, thanks ironically to dog owners; thus the next-best solution is to ban the most-abused breeds.
I'm not going to back off of this until I see better statistics. It's true that a number of large breeds have been involved in human deaths, but about half the total human deaths involve packs of feral dogs.
The interesting question would be, how many breeds are involved in fatal single dog attacks while in the owner's home.
If all breeds could become equally good at everything with the right upbringing there'd have been no need to specialize and selectively breed dogs to do any of the jobs they now do.
If you abused my Labrador, he'd have peed all over himself and cried, but never ever would he have fought back. It just was not in him.
Give the breeders some credit. They've created a dog that fights both well and hard, having strength and a tenacity to never give up, no matter the pain.
Your post presupposes that the "pit bull" is a breed.
It is not.
there ARE particular bloodlines with temperament problems in ANY breed. A professional trainer friend of mine has a dynamite field trial dog who has made something like five Grand Passes and has gone to the Nationals several times. He is however a VERY nasty dog both to other dogs and to humans. She has to keep him crated up and away from the line when other dogs are around, and she has had to discipline him with almost military precision in order to control him at all.
He is a Golden Retriever - the supposed pussycat and family companion.
As a matter of fact, there is a certain Seal Point Siamese stud cat that was the meanest cat I ever saw (he savaged a judge IN the show ring one time - chewed his hand and arm to pieces). He also passed on a hideous temperament to his offspring (he is dead now, and not much regretted . . . ) I purchased a Blue Point male with this cat five generations back, and believe it or not the grouchiness is still there. Kinda scary that it persists like that.
They keep saying it's "irresponsible owners" - not the breed.
So because other breeds of dogs don't slaughter children or old ladies - or almost never do - does that mean that all the owners of other breeds are "responsible".
Wow - what an amazing coincidence. </sarcasm
Roe v. Wade is not the law of the land. It is the opinion of a court that regularly exceeds its authority. Courts aren't authorized to make law. Roe v. Wade as 'law' would fall apart under any serious challenge backed by a majority of the people. The sad truth of the matter is that there is no majority of the people with the fortitude to stand up to judicial tyranny.
Actually, that has happened in Virginia, and just recently. An elderly woman and her small dog were attacked and killed by more than one "pit bull type" dog, running loose in that neighborhood.
People in the neigborhood had complained to animal control about these dogs. In my opinion, heads should roll in that county's animal control department. Their laziness and ineptitude cost a woman her life. These dogs had killed a neighbor dog already, which puts them SQUARELY WITHIN the parameters of this law, which if enforced, would have been perfectly adequate for the situation. I will go one step better. IF the blasted dog catcher had simply enforced the EXISTING LEASH LAW, that poor woman's family would not have had to bury her!
Sorry, Susan, but I do not endorse your shotgun approach to this problem. Remember, we outlawed drugs decades ago, and that sure has prevented all drug problems since, now, hasn't it?
So they don't exist? They're like Bigfoot? The dog exists, whether you call them AmStaffs or Pit Bulls. But I agree that ~proving~ breed in a mutt on the street is impossible, and that is why I don't like legislation.
I do think the field Labs are a little sharper than the conformation dogs.
Obviously the Staffs were originally bred for dogfighting, and they need consistent training and a responsible owner. But what's going on with the "pit bull type" has edged over into outright hysteria. The real problem here is the treatment by thug owners.
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