Posted on 06/03/2011 7:47:48 PM PDT by Jim 726
Pet pit bull mauls and kills 15-day-old baby
Pit bulls and other large dogs continue to maim and kill people. Is it because these dogs are aggressive and dangerous or are they owned by irresponsible and careless people?
Buster didn't have a history of being aggressive. He was a family pet, a year old and hyper like many young dogs. Buster's owner, 25-year-old Mallory Wildig had been staying at her mother's house following the birth of Darius on February 4 along with her 2-year-old son, Keylin Tillman. She would return home to feed Buster and let him outside. The times she couldn't get home a friend of her father would stop by to feed the dog. Wildig and her two children returned home on February 19. She had Keylin feed the dog, he was then let outside and given a bath afterward.
After reading to the children in Keylin's room she turned a movie on for Keylin and took the infant to her room for a nap. After closing the door she returned to Keylin's room and laid down with him for his nap. The dog was on the floor near them. Her cell phone woke her up about 10 minutes later. She went to check on Darius and found him on the floor dead.
The Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety report said she, “discovered that Darius was dead and had been mauled and partially consumed by Buster."
The report said she sobbed throughout her initial interview with Detective Sheila Goodell. According to Mlive.com Wildig told the detective when she found her son his bassinet was tipped over and Darius was on the floor.
According to the police report Wildig said, “When I walked into the room, there was blood on the bassinet and he just looked like a little doll on the floor. It felt like all of this was a nightmare.”
Charges of involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to animals were sought against Wildig, but the Kalamazoo County Prosecutor’s Office declined to authorize charges. lamazoo County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Carrie Klein said, “This was her baby. She loved her baby. She was traumatized by what happened.”
Klein said to charge Klein there there would have be gross negligence showed.
Klein said, “Nobody ever saw any aggressive or violent tendencies from the pet at all. There was no way for the mother to know it was going to attack and kill someone. It was not gross negligence on her part to have the dog running loose in the house with the baby in the bassinet. She had no way of knowing the dog was going to do what it did.”
Buster was euthanized and an autopsy showed the dog's stomach was full of food.
Last month, Saquina Jubeark, a mother of three little boys, ages 2, 4 and 5 said she left the room they were in to get something out of the stroller. When she returned to the room where the boys were she saw her Cane Corso tearing at the 4-year-old. The little boy died from being bitten in the head and neck.
According to neighbors the home was like a zoo with the Cane Corso, a pit bull, a German Shepherd, a parrot and a snake.
Neighbors said it took 10 firefighters to remove the dogs from the home.
Nydailynews.com reports Kenny Riser the superintendent of the building said "People were scared of those dogs. The dogs belong to the husband, who is seldom here. This was a tragedy waiting to happen."
Shelbra Freeman, 72-years-old saw her neighbors pit bull loose and was trying to let them know when the dog turned on her.
Another neighbor heard the dog barking and when she went outside she saw Freeman near her yard. wyff4.com reports her neighbor Erica Sykes said, "(Freeman) was just laying here screaming for help and she had blood running everywhere. So, I just wrapped her arm up with a towel and squeezed it real tight and just tried to help her breathe and calm down because she was still screaming .All I was worried about was just helping her. I mean, it was shocking."
Another neighbor said, "I ran over there. She was sitting up with her ear lobe chewed off and blood all over her arms and, I mean, it was just horrible." Freeman is recovering in a hospital.
Chad McBride from the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office said the dog is being quarantined for 10 days and the owner, David Milner, has been cited for no proof of rabies and dog running at large.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/307542#ixzz1OGr13zrS
So if you let your baby get killed by your dog, and you say you love your baby, you will not be prosecuted.
Naaah, no women would ever lie about this. No woman ever has cried fake tears and gotten out of something totally evil.
Don’t see anything possibly wrong with this.
Just liek the ongoing epidemic of fat inner city moms and dads “co-sleeping” with infants they roll over nad crush to death. How convenient.
They all ought ot be charged with negligent homicide or manslaughter. These are defenseless human beings they are TOTALLY responsible for. Their lives are worth nothing if these people get off with NOTHING.
And if you really love the kid, you don’t have a breed of dog KNOWN to rip little kids apart and kill them. You just don’t. You make provisions to PROTECT the kid. How about a LOCKING DOOR so the dog can’t get in if you FALL the FRICK asleep?!?!?
Idiots. Idiots with no damn common sense in their heads. And the stupid powers that be let them off. But those same powers will be happy their police force takes down a licensed carry citizen and treats them like criminals.
She had the 2 yr old feed the dog?
Some people shouldn’t have pets OR KIDS!
Something tells me there is more to this story. A dog doesn’t just one day decide to have a child for lunch.
I may get a lot of flak about this but I dont care - if ever there was an animal that deserved to be extinct because of its reputation, its the Pit Bull. Far too many people has been harmed by them both intentionally and non-intentionally.
Wow! You saved a life when you were that young! Can’t imagine how there would be one less woman walking around today if you had not thought to choke it to death. While I would want to help I think I would have, in my teens, tried hitting it with things and that usually doesn’t work at all. People talk about hitting a pit with tire irons, boards etc. and the dogs usually don’t let go but continue that lethal shake you describe.
The weird underworld of people who MUST own these dogs, and no other breed, often caution one another to be ‘responsible’ and carry a ‘break stick’ which is a small pry bar to use when their ‘pet’ closes it’s jaws on another dog or human and won’t let go and/or just shakes his prey when commanded to release. Like any responsible dog owner would want to own a dog breed known to grab/hold/shake to the extent you need to carry a tool for that, like a responsible person would own a dog breed that causes the most fatalities in the US, killing one person on average every 21 days, killing more adults than children...yeah...they call themselves ‘experienced’ and ‘responsible’.
And the owner of the dog you killed was angry with YOU? No matter how much I loved my dogs, I would kill it myself if I found it shaking a child like that. It would be emotionally shattering but I know which side I’m on - the child’s. But then I do not consider any pet an extension of my personal power and importance the way pit owners do. See, there’s that difference...
I agree with you. I read a study that reported that pits had been selectively bred to increase the likelihood that they would have a specific type of brain lesion that is otherwise rare among the dog breeds. For example, collies, dalmations, daschunds may have this deformity but it would be rare. But years of intentionally selecting to breed for agression in pits has increased the prevalence of these brain lesions which are thought to be responsible for the remorseless attack machine behavior of pits - it is essentially a bypass to normal behavior. This brain lesion often doesn’t assert itself on pit behavior prior to 18months of age - which is when some people first note unanticipated aggression in their previously cuddly puppy. So buying a pit is a game of Russian roulette that pit owners are willing to play - with other peoples lives or pets. When a pit kills a family member - other pit owners toss that pit owner under the bus labeling him/her ‘inexperienced’ and ‘irresponsible’ even if the owner continues to explain that the dog just ‘went off’ one day. Because the owners are willing to lie and deny and mislead and their breed of choice is responsible for destroying the most lives (survivors face years of reconstructive surgery)- yeah, I think the breed should be banned.
I took my cat to the vet today for a blood test. While I was sitting and waiting for my cat, a lady came in with a handsome dog that turned out to be half Australian heeler and half pit bull. I petted her; she seemed like a nice dog. The vet tech brought my meowing cat back in his carrier . . . and suddenly that dog assumed “the stance” — you know, the one that says “THAT’S LUNCH!” I have taken my kitties to the vet many times, seen a lot of big dogs there, and NEVER had one immediately focus on my pet as food before. I got up and moved out of reach.
BS.
You’re pimping a new twist on an old “myth” once applied to another “killer breed”.
“The brains of Pit Bulls swell and cause them to go crazy”.
Prior to the boom in Pit Bull popularity, the Doberman Pinscher was rumored to suffer from an affliction of the brain in which the skull became too small too accommodate a dog’s grey matter.
This would, according to the rumor, cause the Doberman to go crazy, or “just snap” out of no where and attack their owner.
This rumor could never be quantified, and indeed had
no merit whatsoever.
Now that the Doberman fad has run its course the Pit Bull has inherited the swelling brain myth.
It is no truer now than it was during the Doberman’s fad days.
“Pit bulls” have no more tendency to “brain lesions” than any other breed.
Post your “scientific study” that disproves me.
FWIW, education cures ignorance.
http://www.pitbulltalk.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12922
Chet’s back.
Mere coincidence.
If I have time, I’ll track down the article. I am not really invested in doing so because I know that the pro pit lobby denies evidence presented (like fatality stats - those are hard to make disappear so they simply deny them, problem solved) so actually presenting evidence to them is a waste of time. Oh I went on page after page with rabid pro pit people - they end up asserting that Llaso Apsos are a greater risk to people and NO I am not joking - they REALLY go there in defense of their breed!
If, in the meantime, you want to believe that pit bulls kill more people than any other dog breed in the US for no medical reason at all, that’s fine with me.
I already know all the “stats”.
Post your proof.
This comes from a sane, reputable site:
Most people skim it and look at the table and way ‘wow, Pits and Rotties’. But if you dig around you find that the authors used media reports to develop their database.
Quote:
Our search strategy involved scanning the text of newspapers and periodicals for certain words and word combinations likely to represent human DBRF followed by a review of articles containing those terms.
And look at what they say in the discussion:
Quote:
Considering only bites that resulted in fatalities, because they are more easily ascertained than nonfatal bites, the numerator of a dog breed-specific human DBRF rate requires a complete accounting of human DBRF as well as an accurate determination of the breeds involved. Numerator data may be biased for 4 reasons. First, the human DBRF reported here are likely underestimated; prior work suggests the approach we used identifies only 74% of actual cases.1,2 Second, to the extent that attacks by 1 breed are more newsworthy than those by other breeds, our methods may have resulted in differential ascertainment of fatalities by breed. Third, because identification of a dog’s breed may be subjective (even experts may disagree on the breed of a particular dog), DBRF may be differentially ascribed to breeds with a reputation for aggression. Fourth, it is not clear how to count attacks by crossbred dogs. Ignoring these data underestimates breed involvement (29% of attacking dogs were crossbred dogs), whereas including them permits a single dog to be counted more than once.
In other words, since bites by certain breeds are more likely to be reported, the data in the table are skewed towards those breeds. Also, they admit that people are lousy at correctly identifying breeds and say that the reputation alone may increase the reporting tendency. Since there is a tendency for the press to misreport dog bites as far as breed, the raw data are biased and frankly, without good data you can’t really develop any reliable conclusions. So IMO the whole thing has a basic flaw.
Continuing on, there was a more recent study done where vets actually saw dogs that had bitten children. The Title was “Behavioral assessment of child-directed canine aggression” published in Injury Prevention Unfortunately the full-text version is no longer available online, but there are excerpts.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/071002-dog-bite.html
http://www.huliq.com/36585/behaviora...ine-aggression
And this is what I had found in there about breeds:
Quote:
A total of 103 dogs had bitten a child under the age of 18 years. ...
Forty one breeds were represented. English Springer Spaniels and German Shepherd Dogs each comprised 9% of pure-bred dogs (7% of all dogs), followed by 5% each of Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, and American Cocker Spaniels (4% of all dogs)
But then you have this:
There is a Dog Statistics done on every dog each year that shows which breeds are more aggressive than others.
Atts - American Temperament Test Society
[Anything above 80% is good]
Dalmation 81.8%, Husky 86.6%, German Shepard/ cop dog 83.5%, Rotts
82.6%, Mastiff 83.9%, American Pit Bull Terrier 84.3%, American Staffordshire 83.4%, Staffordshire Bull Terrier 85.3%, and Boxer
84.3
Now the nice little dogs.
Collie 53.3%, Bichon Frise 79.3%, Corgi 75.4%, Chihuahua 70.3%,
Dachshund 70.2%, Setter 75%, Schnauzer 75.5%, Lhasa Apso 69.2%
Oh I have seen the oceans of ‘information’ posted by pro pit people. Doesn’t change the well earned reputation of pits for unprovoked, sustained damage most often resulting in death. I have tried talking through that kind of padding that the pro pit throws - it was like speaking to a wall. The need for the pro pit lobby to deny the actual, documented behavior of pits is too strong to give way to reason.
Note that you are already spinning - I never said brain swelling (a la dobermans - never heard of that before). I said I read a study and you demand I provide my ‘proof’. Oh I can see where this is going because I have posted the study before and I have gotten back the nonsense stats falsely elevating the ‘hazard’ other breeds offer etc. Anyway, this is a study re the heritability of behavior:
Since people like me read up on the number of deaths, maimings etc., read victim accounts, watch videos and can’t find any mitigating evidence, I am not swayed by angry denials, name calling, or the posting of pit bulls pictures that look ‘cute’. Since many of the pro pit lobby have a psychological need to believe that it’s all made up lies/persecution/ignorance, all the posts in all the world documenting the disproportionate damage this breed does will be ignored/denied etc. The only ones left are those who have been duped into buying a pit for their family because ‘everyone says they are unfairly maligned and are safe if you treat them right’ and those who just have never heard of the issue and are new to it.
From the article:
“Research now shows that, through selection
for aggressive performance, we have in fact been consistently selecting for very specific
abnormalities in the brain. These abnormalities appear in many breeds of dog as an accident
or anomaly, which breeders then attempt to breed out of the dogs. In the case of the
aggressive breeds, the opposite was true. Rather than excluding abnormally aggressive dogs
from their breeding stock, breeders focused on creating lineages in which all the dogs would
carry these genes (i.e., dogs which would reliably exhibit the desired impulsive aggressive
behavior). They succeeded. Now that we know exactly which brain abnormalities breeders
have been selecting, the assertion that this aggression is not heritable is no longer tenable. It
is also not tenable to assert that not all the dogs of these breeds will carry these genes. The
lack may occur as an accident where selection has failed, just as the golden retriever mayhave
the genes due to failing selection against the genes. But the failure to have the gene is, in the
aggressive breeds, just that – a failure. It is therefore misleading to assert that the aggressive
breeds will only have the selected genes as a matter of accident, or that most of them will be
fit to interact safely with other animals and humans. We have selected intensively for these
genes in these breeds, for hundreds of years, and the accident that may incidentally occur is
lack of the selected genes”
If the pro pit lobby wants to believe that their is no medical explanation for the body count pits leave behind - it doesn’t really matter to me. Parts of the country are enacting breed specific laws because they just can’t afford the societal costs behind the killings, maiming, and police calls pit bulls provoke so the problem is slowly working itself out on its own -whether the pro pit lobby screams ‘it’s all lies! ALL OF IT!’ or not.
Nooo....go back and reread what Sal said.
So where is the scientific study?
Where is the list of the cites?
“These dogs will seek opportunities to execute the behaviors they’ve been bred for, just simply because the behavior feels good”?!?
*This* flaky screed is your “proof”?
~Seriously~?
This is an -opinion- piece gussied up with some uncited and alleged hypotheses written by some woman.
Where is the data/study/evidence?
FYI, I spun precisely -nothing-.
The myth of the “genetic brain disease killer dog” is an old, boring one.
Sorry you haven’t been around long enough to watch its “evolution” into the vaguer version of “lesions”.
Talk about “padding”.
It won’t.
It doesn’t ~want~ to read reality.
Just the other day, I was in PetCo buying Comets and a fawn Pit came in with her owners.
A lovely, well behaved dog, was she.
No sooner had she walked in the door, happily greeting the employees who came to pet her, she was beset upon by a brace of yapping, snapping little frou-frou dogs who had just came out of the nearby doggy hair salon.
[the noise was a cacophony of hysterical mini-rage, echoing clear back to the fish section where I stood]
The Pit disregarded the little terrors with calm boredom and I watched their owner do _absolutely nothing_ to control or subdue her snarling darlings...not even after they began to snap at customers coming in, [some of them, children] being highly frustrated by the lack of response by the Pit.
I quietly watched all of this, just in case somebody got nailed because I wanted the Pit to have a witness to her innocence, knowing that no matter what -really- happened, she’d get get the blame for the other dogs’ hideous, horrendous, utterly out of control behavior.
[their owner never even offered an apology or acknowledgment that her dogs were menacing everything within reach of their rhinestone leases]
Now I ask you; in that scenario, who was the “dangerous dog”?
“Now I ask you; in that scenario, who was the “dangerous dog”?”
My Aunt had a yappy little poodle that would nip, and once bit me as a kid. Drew a bit of blood and I cried, but not “dangerous”.
Our neighbors had a pit bull, and when we would have it over when they were out of town it would lay in my daughter’s bed - under the covers, with it’s head on the pillow next to my daughters!
My daughter and wife thought it was cute, so did I. But I wouldn’t let them sleep that way. As the potential for a “dangerous” bite was there, just as it is from our black lab. Although I must admit I am more comfortable around our lab just by the sake of knowing him better. Plus, I don’t think the jaws and pressure of our lab would compare to that of a pit bull.
Really the question about your Petco story is “who are the dangerous owners”?
“Really the question about your Petco story is “who are the dangerous owners”?”
YOU, dear one, are a very, *very* sharp and astute person!
Therein lies the key to *all* of it.
Case in point;
Two un-neutered males who are [well, were] full brothers [from a previous litter/same parents] of my European Dobe have already been euthanized for “aggression” by their owners by the age of 18 months.
[approximate onset age of puberty/territorial drive/’adult’ behavior]
The _excuse_ for the killing was, ironically, the mythical “Doberman brain syndrome”.
[even some vets are -that- stupid and ignorant]
They were both a terrible loss to the breed.
The Euro Dobe -is- a much “sharper”, more “driven” dog than its Americanized counterparts.
*My* boy is not only well behaved, dependable and solid, he is a joy to children everywhere [he adores them beyond all sanity] *and* is a support dog.
Though he can be extremely ‘hard mouthed’ when necessary, little children can safely feed him little tidbits with no fear because he switches to very, very ‘soft mouthed’ when taking treats from them, as he was -taught- to do.
*If* he even thinks he feels their little fingers pushed too near his teeth, he immediately goes slack-jawed and backs away so as not to accidentally injure.
The differential diagnoses?
The -owner-.
His brothers were bought on a whim by novices who had no clue how to redirect and focus their intense drive/need to “work” in a positive, responsible and beneficial fashion.
I’ve had high-drive Dobes for 37 years.
My dog started his intensive socialization process at the tender age of 6 weeks and has ‘refresher courses’ frequently via visits to pet stores, public events, etc where he is encouraged to interact with and charmingly dazzle one and all.
Rarely does the average Pit enjoy such necessary educational kindness.
Those who ‘backyard breed’ them care nothing for their future or the safety of their potential owners or other people the dog will undoubtedly encounter throughout life.
It’s all about either money or “reputation” for meanness.
[a “reputation” which is easy to gain if you do not properly socialize ALL pups from _day one_]
Your story made me laugh...my aunt had a savage teacup Chihuahua that was the bane of my mother’s existence.
The dog rarely walked.
My aunt carried it everywhere, held close to her shoulder.
-Every- time my aunt walked past my mom, the dog snaked out and nipped her.
She tried to snap me once but the “right stare” made her shrink back to my aunt’s shoulder.
The little hell-spawn and I became good friends, after that.
Bottom line is, and always has been, from monster mastiff to mini Poodle, there is a ‘wolf’ in your living room.
We may all forget that at our own peril.
“...there is a ‘wolf’ in your living room.”
Both of our dogs have been mutt rescue dogs and have been the sweetest things. But when the kids were young I was always a bit leery. One never knows when playing “dress up” with the dog will put it over the edge!
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