Posted on 12/16/2017 2:07:04 PM PST by BenLurkin
Bethany Lynn Stephens had been gone for about a day since she left to walk her dogs. So her father went out to look for her at the area she frequented.
There, authorities say, he found her two dogs, guarding what he first thought was an animal carcass.
“Much to his horror, discovered that it was not,” Goochland County Sheriff Jim Agnew told reporters at a news conference Friday.
Investigators in Goochland, Va., a rural community about 30 miles outside of Richmond, say the petite, 5-foot-1 young woman, who weighed a little more than 100 pounds, was mauled to death by her dogs, which had a combined weight of about twice hers, while out on a walk earlier this week. Her father found her Thursday evening in a wooded area that used to be a farm, about a half a mile from the main road...
“The dogs clearly, at least in our estimation in a dark night, had something to do with this. It was an absolutely grisly mauling,” Agnew told reporters. “In my 40 years of law enforcement, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Hope I’d never see anything like it again.”
Officials from the county’s animal control department and sheriff’s office spent at least an hour trying to tranquilize the animals, Agnew said. Investigators also found bloody articles of clothing scattered in the area.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Agreed. The problem with pit bulls, like wolf derivatives, is that there is indeed a genetic component.
This isn’t like “Trading Places” where they humorously play out the nature versus nurture argument. This is real life.
Honestly, you see this shallowness of the veneer of domestication in house cats. They are wonderful, beautiful, loving animals, but when you see that veneer scratched, their lineage from wild animals is striking to see. The veneer is thinner on cats, but they aren’t inclined to attack humans in general.
Animals are odd. Like you said...there can be something to trigger them...a body posture, a squeal, a show of physical fear...and they can punch right through that veneer of domesticity.
The nose looks too long for a Pit to me but a lot of Pits are crossed with something else. The dog in this picture looks just like the Catahoula Leopard hound/Rotty cross I had. Everybody thought both of mine were Pitt’s too but they weren’t even close. A couple of cyclists were riding past my house once and my dogs were running along the fence. One guy said, “Is that a Pit Bull?” The other guy said “if that’s a Pit it’s the biggest da*n Pit I ever saw”. Catahoula’s are big, brindle and spotted but the head is a little different than a Pit.
I saw something once that had several pictures of what most people call Pit Bulls and said to pick out the Pit. Only one was a Pit. I’m not saying they aren’t Pits, I’m just suspecting that they aren’t.
I've noticed that a lot of maladjusted disturbed people own pit bulls. I suppose they think owning vicious dogs makes them "tough guys". In reality it only confirms the diagnosis.
I thought Willie Green was the train guy.
Yes, I admit I don’t know. The deceased and her friend apparently refer to them as pit bulls, and they kind of look like at the very least they could be pit mixes.
I personally think they are potentially dangerous for un-trained people to own, and the problem (as another poster said) is that for every dedicated and trained person who owns them and can control them, there are probably ten times that number who buy them as a symbol, or because they heard they are good protectors without either understanding or accepting the responsibility for owning them.
I think if you are knowledgable and accept the responsibility of owning them and keeping them in line while knowing the potential hazard, that is probably okay to me, but...there is no way to determine who is and who isn’t responsible or qualified.
Just my opinion.
I am not buying dogs that she raised from puppies attacking and killing her. There is another actor that the dogs probably drove off.
Check their poo for her DNA.
One thing that is wrong with them is that people back-yard breed them with no care to the genetics and breeding out the bad parts, like extreme aggression. Breeders of all kinds are messing a lot of dogs up, not just Pits.
Pits are extremely dog aggressive and are bred that way because they used them to fight for so many years. They go crazy when that fight instinct kicks in. The worst thing a person can do is try to break up a fight.
IMO, most of the Pits are too far gone to ever be safe with most people. Years and years ago before they started breeding them to fight, they might have made good pets and probably were, a long time ago. Too many years of breeding aggressive dogs to aggressive dogs has made most of them irredeemable.
Another problem is the majority of people that own them. There are a few nice families that own them but most I see are tattooed skinhead types or blacks dripping with chains and gang tats.
If there are any bears, wild hogs or mountain lions in the woods where that happened, I’m inclined to wonder if one attacked the dogs, the woman or both. I’m not familiar with the wildlife in that state, though...
We had a Husky/GSD mix and she was one of the most gentle dogs I have ever encountered. The only thing that she didn't like was other female dogs. She would growl some but it wasn't super aggressive. She loved to make friends with male dogs.
The facts as stated don’t pass the smell test. There is more to this than told in the article.
Not saying the authorities are deliberately hiding something. They could be, or they could simply be missing info, or they could be incompetent.
I don’t think it looks like a Pitbull either-my daughter has an AKC Pitbull as her pet and companion dog-they are big Terriers, and that dog hasn’t got a terrier look at all-like you said, looks like a hound-looks a lot like my neighbor’s brindle Bullmastiff, too...
I love German Shepherds-the female we had when my cub was a toddler guarded that kid so well that my hubby and I were the only ones who could pick her up anywhere but inside the house-even my brother got a death stare and growl and had to back off if the cub was playing outside. I don’t have that breed anymore because their lifespan is so short so they are lost far too soon-Chows and Huskies can live well over 15 years in good health-mine made it to 17.
Huskies are dog aggressive, too-I knew that when I got mine and didn’t have another dog, or let her be around other dogs unless there was a fence between them and a leash. Unlike what I’d always been told, she accepted my cats as playmates from the time she was a puppy, let them sleep against and on top of her in her bed, and eat from her bowl...
Absolutely. It took way too many posts before yours for this to be said. Of course heated debate will follow.
But with that breed, it is not “if” but “when”.
Didn't he keep a ping list and post about every business that closed or had a massive layoff?
I think you summed it up pretty comprehensively there.
I used to know a couple back in the Eighties who purchased a Fila Braziliero (if I spelled that right) after their house had been broken into five times. (Neighborhood went bad on them)
Big, BIG dog. Head like a mastiff, body with those orange and black almost tiger markings, and a pair of eyes that just watched you the entire time. I never felt at ease, and my wife didn’t like it at all.
The wife told me years later she felt a little nervous around the dog, too.
Thing is, like most humans, I have this conceit that I could handle a dog of up to maybe 50-60 lbs with my bare hands if I had no choice, I think I could find a way to win it.
But a dog of 185 lbs? That would be like a lion to me, and my only hope would be to get my hands on a knife or an object like a baseball bat, and even then I feel I would still get hurt.
And two fifty lb dogs. I have serious doubts if I could stand up to that in any way.
No. Unless this is an elaborate scheme by someone like a scumbag guy who had a thing for her which she didn’t share and he had dogs of his own that he contrived to set on her there...but even still, it seems like it would be no problem determining after the fact that were the case.
No. Using Occam’s Razor here, she was attacked and torn apart by her own dogs. Ugh, what a terrible way to go.
That I don’t remember. I actually got along with him for a long time, but over time, I became less and less interested in public transportation as a preferred way of travel.
It is an individualistic thing with me. That’s it. I think public transportation is fine for those who want to use it, but...I don’t.
One day the argument about public transportation got heated, and he stopped visiting FR sometime after that. Don’t know if that was just coincidental...there were plenty worse than my conversations with him.
Her FB page is still active.
She had no “pit bulls”.
She had a merle Great Dane and a dark brindle dog that looks like a Plott Hound mix.
All the animals you mentioned, and black bears would leave the same wounds and that area is full of them.
Where are the forensics people?
No one is checking the bites to identify the animal?
Right. I think the dogs would paw around in the blood normally, but in a mauling like that, they would be covered in it. There is a surprising amount of blood in a human body.
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