Safety of the public
must come first when it comes to pit bulls like the “shelter favorite” that attacked a Lake man, writes Lauren Ritchie.
Chris Luhrs, a 40-year-old Disney World mechanic who keeps the popular Jungle Cruise ride running, was standing in a tiny room at the Lake County Animal Shelter stroking a potential new family member named “Big Man.”
Suddenly, Luhrs’ pregnant partner, Julie Grant, noticed the pitbull mix — you knew this story would be about a pit bull, didn’t you? — pull his lips back over his teeth in what very clearly was friendly smile.
“Julie locked eyes with me, and he leaped,” said Luhrs, an Army veteran who lives with Grant on 27 acres south of Groveland. “He was getting petted one second and the next, it was a full-on attack — barking and biting. He bit my nose, and at the same time knocked out my front tooth … He lunged for her [Grant], and I intervened.”
That act of bravery Feb. 2 is costing him.
The animal kept biting while Luhrs bellowed at Grant, who was pinned in a corner, to get out of the room. Blood sprayed all over, and Grant — a pit-bull lover — started beating on the glass walls to get help. A worker came running with a mop and used it to beat the dog off Luhrs.
The director of Lake EMS, which carted Luhrs to South Lake Hospital in Clermont, described the incident as “very minor” — a few puncture wounds and a few scratches. Luhrs’ point of view is different. He spent three days in the veterans hospital in Lake Nona after the wound got infected. Now he has little range of motion in his dominant right hand, no feeling in his fingertips or upper palm, can’t make his hand grasp a tool, needs plastic surgery on his nose and will have to pay out of pocket for a dental implant or bridgework so he doesn’t look like something out of “The Beverly Hillbillies” for the rest of his life.
This big man screamed as doctors probed the bites with needles, twisting and turning them deep into the puncture wounds to inject anti-rabies medicine where it had to be delivered because the dog had gotten a rabies vaccine only the day before — not enough time to take effect.
On Wednesday, doctors ordered a month of physical therapy for “crushed” nerves in his forearm — he is still out of work with no guarantee the nerves will spring back. Grant bursts into uncontrollable tears when a dog barks.
Welcome, dear reader, to Central Florida, land of unwanted pit bulls. Shelters are filled with them. And it’s become politically incorrect to suggest that these marvelous puppies might rip your face off. Too bad: they can and sometimes do.
Nobody keeps very reliable dog-bite statistics, but using newspaper accounts of death by dog, DogsBite.org calculated that 232 people were killed by pit bulls or their mixes between 2005 and 2015, accounting for 64 percent of all deaths though they make up only 6.6 percent of all dogs in the