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To: solosmoke

When is the last time CDC issued a report of Dog Fatalities...1998?

AKC and UKC? You crazy? They have $Millions at stake keeping the breeding license and registration license gravy train going. They are up to their eyeballs in this thing..

You guys need to come up a better schtick....People want these attacks prevented.


262 posted on 04/16/2006 6:47:30 PM PDT by Wristpin ("The Yankees announce plan to buy every player in Baseball....")
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To: Wristpin

You are absolutely right. The CDC stopped publishing dog fatality statistics, stating that relying on witness accounts and people like police officers and well-meaning animal control officers was unreliable when it came to correctly identifying breed and a number of other factors. Their numbers always came from HSUS, which came from media sources. They have always been flawed due to the fact that in a traumatic dog situation, the breed of dog tends to get "upgraded", and the media reports it that way. Later on, if it turns out the dog was not the breed reported, often nothing more than a small blurb will appear somewhere in the middle of the newspaper, if at all, and by then these reports are already used in making the numbers.

Although I agree with the CDC about the numbers being flawed, I would like for them to continue publishing them anyway, but I would also like to see each incident investigated more thoroughly, and if the breed of dog is honestly not known, then it should be stated as such. When I worked in an animal shelter in Iowa, I remember a nice lady coming in and complimenting how pretty and well behaved our "boston terrier" was. It was a 46 pound red nosed pit bull.

And as for the money the AKC and UKC are making, the AKC only registers American Staffordshire Terriers, which only numbered 1500 recently. The UKC stands to make quite a bit of money registering not only American Staffordshire Terriers, but American Pit Bull Terriers. The last I checked their numbers were at 200 thousand. However, there are about 4 million of these dogs, so they haven't even "tapped" their own resource. Most of these dogs aren't registered at all.

Although it is easy to use these two organizations as sources for my numbers, I could just as quickly get numbers from Veterinarian associations, Animal Welfare organizations, and local hospitals, and they all say the same thing. In fact, the only organizations I have found at all that support breed bans are PETA (Who by the way want to eventually rid the world of pets. Their words, not mine)and HSUS, the same organization that originally provided numbers for the CDC's statistics. Hmmm....

I want to see these attacks prevented too. But the difference is that I want ALL dog attacks to be prevented, no matter what dog does it. Because of working in places with animals so much, I have been bitten more than most people in their whole lives will. The worst bites are always from the little nippers that think they're bigger than they are. Punting them comes to mind, but then I have to remember who brought them in. The owners are to blame in almost every instance. No dog has the capacity to be evil. They are all products of their environments.

If we really could prevent these attacks from happening, the first step would be to educate everyone on dogs and their needs, temperaments, etc. That way, there would never be toddlers running up to nursing dams, kids locked in basements while their mom's child aggressive dog roams the house, children going into a dog's kennel or feeding dogs unsupervised, or 12 year olds fighting dogs for whatever stupid reason. Of all the different associations with numbers on this, none of them disagree that the main thing tying every attack together is the type of owner.


264 posted on 04/18/2006 11:16:22 AM PDT by solosmoke
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