Unleash efforts to regulate pit bulls
Last week a woman in Roxbury lost control of her dog, a pit bull mix.
It was in the midst of mauling a woman when police shot it. Also last week in Hyannis, a 22-year-old man was attacked and wounded by a pit bull named Zeus.
In January, in Falmouth, a 1-year-old girl sustained lifethreatening injuries when the family pit bull attacked her, biting her in the face. The child’s father had to resort to stabbing the animal with a knife to end the attack. After being treated locally she was flown to a Boston hospital for further care.
In December, a 22-yearold PetSmart employee was mauled by a pit bull during a grooming. She was initially treated at Cape Cod Hospital and then airlifted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The owner of Bubba described the dog to NBC News as “sweet as can be.”
Last November, when a pit bull attacked someone in Amesbury, residents were told to “shelter in place” in several neighborhoods. Although police shot it with a stun gun, the animal was on the loose while people were forced to stay inside.
Tragically, last October in Lowell, a 7-year-old boy was killed by two pit bulls after wandering into a fenced-in area of a residence.
And that is just a snapshot of a few local pit bull attacks.
Nationally, a “pit bull attack” Google search will yield a tsunami of results.
When are we going to stop pretending?
The breed is dangerously flawed. It is designed to rip and tear with super strong jaws and unfortunately it is frequently children who pay the price.
Most pit bull defenders mean well. They see a breed that grabs headlines unfairly, a breed that is at the mercy of the programming of their often negligent and abusive owners. And there is something to that. The problem is that pit bulls often produce catastrophic damage to their victims in seconds.
Yes, golden retrievers bite more than pit bulls, but a golden retriever doesn’t generally dismember a child or require cops to shoot it multiple times in order to unlock its deadly jaws.
Many pit bulls are sweet animals. Many news accounts include testimony from surprised owners attesting to the gentleness of their pets. The problem occurs when a child walks into the invisible kill zone and triggers the otherwise sweet animal to do the thing it was bred for hundreds of years to do: attack and rip.
We need to think smarter about this issue. We cannot blame a shooting on an inanimate gun but assign no blame to a pit bull that will wantonly jump a fence to kill a child.
The damage to victims is too gruesome to overlook, especially in children.
The statistics prove that the breed is just too dangerous. According to dogsbite.org, “39 U.S. dog bite-related fatalities occurred in 2017 ... pit bulls contributed to 74 percent (29) of these deaths. Pit bulls make up about 6.5 percent of the total U.S. dog population. During the 13-year period of 2005 to 2017, canines killed 433 Americans. Two dog breeds, pit bulls (284) and rottweilers (45), contributed to 76 percent (329) of these deaths.”
We are not a society that seizes pets left and right, but we should certainly restrict access to pit bulls and endeavor to breed them out of existence.