Pit Bull-shit

Something horrible happened to my brother A. He's a policeman in big city. He and his partner were looking for a fugitive and went to a known haunt to search. The woman who was there allowed them to search, but told them that there were 5 pit bull dogs. 4 were okay, but one was "crazy". The search went smoothly until the last room. A asked the woman to restrain the dog so that he could search the room. She complied, but the dog "got away" from her and attacked my brother. It grabbed his hand, breaking two bones and causing a huge laceration. The woman got the dog off of him, but when it got away from her again, A shot it in the head. It went down and while the woman was busy freaking out, the damned dog started getting up AGAIN! A had no choice but to shoot it again, several times, to make sure it was dead. For his trouble, A has a broken hand and cannot do his job for a couple of months. Since he absolutely loves his job, this is probably not time off that he will enjoy...


What are people thinking when they keep dogs like that? The ONLY purpose for having an animal like that is hurting other people. I'm not talking about the dogs that really are family animals and are brought up with love and affection. I'm talking about the ones that are trained to "guard" or fight. They are a menace to everyone. I don't know how this woman is feeling now. Is she sad the dog is gone? Concerned that it hurt someone? Worried about being charged with a crime? Who knows? Why did she have that dog in the first place?

There is a difference between a dog that has been taught to be crazy and one that is neurotic. I had a seriously neurotic dog once. She wandered up at work and I took her home. She was very sweet, but I didn't know her background, so I didn't know if she'd been abused. We had two other dogs and the new one thought SHE should be the alpha female. The other two sort of looked at each other and shrugged - who is this crazy bitch anyway? We had her when our son was born, but by the time he was learning to walk she was getting pretty odd. One night she decided to sleep in my son's room. I called her out and she came but then turned around and went back in and defiantly sat and stared at me. So I took her collar and gently pulled her out of the room. She then not-so-gently shredded my hand. It took me half an hour to stop the bleeding. She knew she was in the doghouse and went and sat quietly in the corner. In the morning, I took her to the pound. Because there was so much collie in her (known biters apparently), she was placed in collie rescue rather than put down. I felt terrible about giving her up, but I'd have felt more terrible if she'd shredded my son's face rather than my hand.

I hope that woman learned something from what happened to my brother. I learned a lot from dealing with my neurotic dog. Nothing - not even a dog's life - is worth the damage to another person that they can inflict when they are trained to be crazy, or when they're born that way.