Responding to pit bull “attacks”

There have been 3 separate incidents in the past week in Indianapolis involving pit bulls.

I’m not going to rehash the circumstances around each of the attacks, because frankly, the circumstances aren’t really known. The media does a terrible job of figuring out “what happened” at the time of the incident and most likely won’t follow up with the truth anyway.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Indy Star after one of the reports, taking them to task for using the term “attack”. The pit bull lunged at an officer after it had been separated from dog it had attacked. Any dog would obviously be stimulated after a fight with another dog. While I understand that in the dictionary sense of the word, “attack” was used appropriately, the reporter made a choice to use inflammatory language that would represent something more serious to the average reader. Hardly balanced reporting.

Inevitably, the conversation will be had regarding some sort of breed specific restrictions. Of course, the online comments section of the newspaper and TV station websites are rife with posts about banning, killing, etc of pit bulls.

Pit bull advocates will continue to remind the media, our legislators, and the public that PET-bulls don’t attack people without provocation. The owners bear the responsibility for these attacks. There are thousands of pit bulls in the city, happily living their life as well-behaved pets.

Someone will try to refute our statements by arguing that one of the owners is a sheriff’s deputy. Surely a law enforcement official is not an irresponsible owner!

The fact that

• the dogs were loose
• one of them was out of date on vaccinations
• it also did not have tags
• oh and, that they attacked someone!!!

proves the point that the owner was irresponsible.

Responsible owners don’t have loose dogs. We ensure that our fences are secure, the dogs aren’t left outside unsupervised (i.e. while you aren’t home), or they are on a leash. Responsible owners vaccinate their dogs, train them, socialize them, and are always aware of what their dogs are doing.

Most often, when talking to neighbors after something of this nature, it becomes apparent that there have been prior issues with the animal. When the public finally understands that these incidents are typically an escalation of a long pattern of issues, they will recognize irresponsible owners as the root cause. We need to educate and encourage our community to take action to prevent these attacks before they happen, not shake our heads after the fact.