When a … tragedy or random event hits, people look for someone to blame. If there’s no one to blame, sometimes they look for someone to hate, even if it is ultimately self-destructive.
Seth Godin
Last night a four-year-old girl was fatally attacked by a neighbour’s dog in Melbourne.
According to the most detailed report, the dog identified as a ‘pit bull cross’ escaped a neighbour’s property, crossed the street and attacked a woman. As she rushed into the house, the animal followed her, attacking a five year old, four-year-old Ayen Chol and her mother Jaclin. The dog’s owner then arrived and removed the dog. Ambulance teams treated Ayen at the scene but could not revive her. The two other injured were taken to Sunshine Hospital in a stable condition.
In the short time since the news broke, this tragic incident has received extensive media exposure, including nearly 400 results on Google and hundreds of TV new, interviews and editorials.
Despite all the hysteria, few details on the circumstances surrounding the attack are available. Information on how the dog was kept by its thirty year old owner aren’t clear – was the dog a pet, or was it an undersocialised ‘backyard’ dog? Had the dog acted in an aggressive way previously or had it been encouraged to do so? Was it trained and exercised regularly? Was it registered with council? Was it chained? Was it desexed?
This lack of detail hasn’t stopped Graeme Smith adopting his usual position of throwing all pit bulls and their owners, even responsible owners of mixed breed dogs, under the bus;
Lost Dogs Home general manager Graeme Smith has called on the State Government to urgently conduct a review of dangerous dog legislation in the wake of the attack.
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“Pit bull terriers and pit bull terrier crosses should be declared dangerous and then they would have to be desexed, vaccinated and microchipped and kept in enclosures on their property or inside the house,” he said.
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“Pit bulls should be treated like swimming pools, they should be fenced off from the rest of the community. They are deadly.”
The truth is the breed and its crosses are already restricted in the state. Owners are required to notify their council, build an enclosure, keep their dogs muzzled and on a lead when off their property and display prescribed warning signs at all entrances to the premises where the dog is kept. Restricted breed dogs born after 2005 are not allowed to be registered and it’s illegal to purchase a restricted breed dog.
But, as has been the experience in each instance where Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) has been enacted, the banning of pit bulls has failed to reduce the number of people injured by dogs. It has certainly failed to save this child.
In addition, thanks to breed bans, responsible pit bull breeders breeding for temperament and health, are now non-existent in Victoria. What is left is a hodgepodge of dogs bred by a catalog of backyard breeders with varying success. And therein lies the rub.
Rather than support the oft repeated ‘fighting dog heritage’ used to justify the culling of pit bulls by supporters of BSL, the spectrum of what a modern ‘pit bull’ actually is has become irreconcilably muddied. Rather than being the domain of ‘tough bad guys’ and an easily identifiable dog breed, literally thousands of families now own a dog which has ‘pit bull’ somewhere in it’s heritage. If we accept that the traits of the pit bull are incompatible with modern dog ownership (I personally don’t, but let’s play devil’s advocate), proponents of BSL need to ask themselves, at what saturation point does being ‘part pitbull’ become a problem for the community? Does a labrador pit bull cross need to be seized from its family and killed? What if that labrador is only 25% pit bull? What about 5%? What if the dog is actually a mastiff crossed labrador but looks like a pit bull?
Meanwhile, the ban does nothing to target dogs which aren’t pit bull types at all, but who are dangerously aggressive.
Continuing down the path of restricting pit bulls will only affect those people with loving, trained, pit bull family members. Owners who seek to have a big, unsocialised, aggressive dog will just dump their pit bull and move onto another breed. Or keep them even more hidden from authorities, since having something ‘illegal’ is likely of no real concern to them, or may actually be more desirable.
We need to treat each dog as an individual, simply because they are. Blanket breed restrictions fail to help owners keep happy, healthy dogs. Killing family pets who’ve done nothing wrong, does not make the community safer. And until we look at the real circumstances that lead to dog attacks, we will continue to see horrific, yet preventable tragedies like the death of little Ayen.
See also: You mean you didn’t want dogs gunned down in the street?
