Pit Bull: Seattle's public enemy no. 1?
I have avoided commenting on this for some time now, but as more and more folks continue to jump on the anti pit bull bandwagon, I felt that someone needed to stand up against this absurdity.First, let me preface my comments by saying that I don't own a dog and have no intention of ever doing so; I find domesticated canines to be dirty and overly needy (not to mention completely unnecessary for urban dwellers). Frankly, I much prefer cats.
But despite this position - or perhaps because of it, and the unbiased perspective on dog ownership that it offers - I still find it ridiculous that so many people are speaking out against pit bulls as pets.
It comes as no surprise that the some of the leading anti pit bull advocates in our local community are members of the editorial staff at The Stranger, Seattle's stereotypical "alternative" weekly newspaper. In a December 27 post on pit bulls gone wild that appeared in their SLOG, Dan Savage comments that it's "[t]oo bad we have to wait until a pit bull attacks before we shoot the damn things." Then, in his Morning News post yesterday, Savage describes the dogs as "crazed killing machines."
The debate moved a bit higher on the journalistic ladder this this morning, when Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur made clear where she stands on the debate.
Brodeur's column explores the idea of a citywide ban on pit bull ownership, similar to the one enacted by Enumclaw in 1990, using a pit bull attack sob story to illuminate her obvious point: that these dogs have no place in our society.
From the piece, "What's a dog-loving city to do?"
One look at Colleen Lynn's arm, and I was chilled — then enraged."Our community is suffering?" No. A small segment of our community - 361 of nearly 600,000 Seattle residents - is suffering. Does a problem facing less than 1% of our population warrant an all-out ban on ownership of a dog that, according to Sunday's P.I., makes up more than 1,500 of our city's 48,329 pet dogs?
She bears six purple marks where a pit bull's teeth sunk in, and a plate beneath her skin to shore up a fractured bone. Six months after Lynn was attacked while running on Beacon Hill, her arm is just 25 percent healed. And that's nothing special.
Between January 2002 and August 2007, the city of Seattle recorded 1,519 dog bites. Pit bulls were responsible for 361 of them — 24 percent.
[...]
Lynn, 38, a freelance Web designer, has been slowly, tentatively researching a citywide ban on pit bulls, or a requirement that the dogs be sterilized. "I have to prepare myself to be massively intimidated," Lynn said Monday. "But we need to recognize the problem. Our community is suffering."
The problem is that Colleen Lynn is too emotionally entrenched in the issue. Of course she's going to go after pit bulls...one attacked her! I feel her pain. No one deserves to be mauled, and its understandable that in such a situation, a victim will look for someone/something to blame. But Lynn's push for a ban on pit bull ownership is no different than, say, George W. Bush's push to depose Saddam Hussein because he was "the guy who tried to kill my dad." When we let personal experience and the emotion surrounding it consume us, we lose sight of reason. Anyone who can look past Lynn's bias and is willing to weigh the facts will know that the obvious answer to the question posed above is "no."
The idea of restricting what type of dogs we can own is, quite simply, an assault on freedom. And thankfully, I'm not the only sane person in this debate. From Brodeur's column:
Ledy Van Kavage, senior director of legal training and legislation with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said breed bans are ineffective and a waste of money.You want to end pit bull attacks, Seattle? Provide more stringent safety regulations for their owners. Weigh heavy fines against folks whose pit bulls get loose. Restrict pit bull ownership on individuals with a history of animal abuse or negligence. But blaming the dogs is absurd; as Brodeur and the P.I. point out, only 361 pit bull attacks happened over a five year period - despite the fact that since 2003, Seattle has had a steadily rising population of these dogs.
"This is America," she said. "You should be able to own whatever breed you want."
What it really comes down to is stereotypes: people oppose pit bull ownership because the occasional brutal attack leads fear-mongering newspaper editors to hype up the threat. As is so often the sad case, these reporters at The Stranger and The Seattle Times are looking for solutions without addressing the real problem. When small children are acting like beasts in public, do we look at them with disgust? No; we blame their parents, who as child-rearing adults have a social duty to control their children.
Dog ownership should be no different. Seattle needs to hold people - not their pets - responsible for community safety.
Causality is of course marked by that Clallam Bay phenomena. The stuff we don't need to talk about.
Are Pitbulls for guys who can't pull chicks?
No pitbulls are for guys who live in trailer homes which stink so much, the females flee to Iowa or Idaho or one of the other Pacific islands our boys took from Hirohito in WWII.
On an erudite blog such as this we need to put the correlation between pitbull ownership and taking it up the ass to one side.
It is enough to say that people with tattoos may have been to prison, they may have a pitbull, they may have a few beers and they may wake up with a sore arse.
Nobody is calling them gay.
Tazia
Aggressive, uncontrolled dogs should be treated like negligently handling firearms. If someone is mauled or bitten, your dog is destroyed on the spot, and you get charged with assault or manslaughter, not some pansy-ass "fine" while letting the ASPCA recycle the dangerous animal back into the neighborhood.
In this case, zero-tolerance, while controversial, seems acceptable to me, (a) because we're living in a city, not in the wilds of bumfuck (you don't need an unsociable predator, sorry, even if it's nice to *your* kids) (b) pets are *not* people, and should *not* be sent to "pet prison" if they are aggressive, they should be destroyed, period.
I agree with you Ezra. I wanna point out though that one of the things many dog lovers dont seem to understand is that NOT all dogs were bred to be pets!
Pit Bulls were specifically bred as fighting dogs and so the creators of the breed selected for extreme aggression.Of the 400+ recognized dog breeds out there, WHY do people choose to have this particular kind of dog(not to mention the even MORE dangerous and thankfully rarer Presa Canario)?
Nobody has ever domesticated a German.
I mean, when they lost their last proper oil-field in 1944, instead of stopping, they just became more badly behaved. Pitbulls are the exact same,
I suspect and predict that pitbulls will offer little to NASA rocket development.
They're exactly like Germans in other words, except they don't do complicated stuff that requires a college education.
Given that the statistics in this post are accurate, the city's 1500 pit bulls represent about 3% of the city's dog population but 24% of it's recorded dog bites. On average, one in every 4.2 pit bulls bit someone during the 5.5 year reporting period.
It seems reasonable to me for people come to the conclusion that these are uncommonly dangerous dogs.
Thank you for this reasoned and balanced story on how Americans are losing their rights to own certain breeds of dogs due to negative media attention, hysteria, fear and breed (and owner) profiling.
Anton stated that not all dogs are bred to be pets. Well Anton, MOST dogs were not bred to be pets. Most dogs were bred to be working dogs, which included attacking, chasing, hunting, or worrying all types of other animals, including human-animals.
Also, I happen to own a Golden Retriever and a Pit bull. Where do I fit in "Tazia's" neat world of Pit bull owner = dirtbag and Golden Retriever owner = nice person?
Dogs are dogs - most good, a few bad. There is no such thing as a bad or vicious breed of dog. But fear, hatred, ignorance are very real and can be found in almost every discussion on Pit bulls by those who know very little about dogs, dog attacks and Pit bulls!
Statistically, Germans also start most of our world wars, does that mean we have to ban them? So, if I had a German neighbor, and I don't, but just say I did, do I report him to somebody to get him taken to a clinic to get straightened out?
That sounds like euthanasia or a gay rock band or something. As usual, as if often the case, it is the harden criminal who has to appeal for an element of compassion, the tree-huggers just want to whack people. This is totally not Haight Asbury.
What a great post from an obviously intelligent and level headed fellow. I am sick of pitbulls being targeted when irresponsible owners are the ones that should be penalized.
I own not one, but two pitbull type dogs and my life revolves around them. They are trained in obedience and agility, extremely social (too much so some days), spayed/neutered, licensed, micochipped, registered with 24petwatch.com and live indoors 24/7. Oh, and I am also a professional women with 6 figure income, who also happens to live in a lovely neighborhood.
On our evening (on leash) walks with my dogs, I am tired of being harassed by aggressive dogs with owners who will not abide by the leash laws in Seattle. One recent weekend I had five encounters with aggressive off leash dogs - none of which were pitbulls! They were a retriever, a maltese terrier, a scarey cockerspaniel, a weirmaraner and a rabid looking border collie. Banning a breed punishes good owners and does nothing to protect the public from irresponsible owners and all the different aggressive dogs I have met.
Phil, your logic is flawed. You concluded from the statistics that "On average, one in every 4.2 pit bulls bit someone during the 5.5 year reporting period."
But that ignores the fact that likely a small number of dogs bit multiple times and on multiple occassions (keep in mind the stats say "dog bites", not attacks - so many of them were probably not serious events and weren't cause for putting down the dog).
Also, we don't know how the statistics were gathered, *and* it is likely that pit bull bites are reported disproportionally - many people would be too embarrassed to report they were bitten by a chihuhua. ;)
"I own not one, but two pitbull type dogs and my life revolves around them."
We should ban those dogs just to force this person to get a life.
MY CAT WAS RECENTLY MULLED AND KILLED BY TWO PIT BULLS. THE OWNER HAS HAD NUMEROUS FINES FOR THESE TWO SINCE 2004 AND THEY KEEP GIVING HIM THESE TWO VICIOUS DOGS BACK TILL LAST WEEK WHEN THEY KILLED TWO OTHER CATS WITH NO WITNESS THEN MY CAT WHICH WAS WITNESSED. DESPITE ALL THE OTHER ATTACKS AND FINE THEY KEPT GIVING THME BACK AND DESPITE ALL THE FINES HE STILL DIDNT KEEP THEM INSIDE OR LEACHED UP. FINES WONT HELP THIS MATTER.