Posted on 07/06/2018 7:09:14 PM PDT by Norski
I post articles on the danger and carnage of dogs bred to fight to the death being introduced to and owned by the general public as pets, and the resulting carnage and public danger thereof.
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“Yeah, okay, but I don’t see the relevance to politics.”
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Von Clauswitz said “War is politics by other means.”
One’s right to own a dangerous dog ends at my property line, my body, my life, the body and lives of those I love, and the safety of the general public.
The ownership of “pit bull type” dogfighting dogs is coming to be regarded (and in many cases, has long been regarded) as an act of aggression, due to the extreme tendancy of the breed to “go game”, exhibiting “impulse aggression” and causing enormous amounts of violence and death. At least 1/3 of the attacks are on the owner, owner’s friends, family, and visitors.
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“Care to tell me what dog bites have to do with Business/Economy; Health/Medicine; History in relation to politics or religion?”
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Very well.
We will begin with Health/Medicine.
PIT BULLS ARE A HEALTHCARE ISSUE
healthcarePit bull attacks are a costly healthcare issue. In 2013, about 27,000 people in the United States underwent reconstructive surgery after a dog attack. About 800,000 bite victims a year, at least half of them children, require medical attention. An average of 25 people a year have been killed by pit bulls in the U.S. in recent years. The collateral costs include life flights, lifesaving interventions, plastic surgeries, burials, and mental health costs for post-surgical trauma and PTSD. Due to the utter savagery of pit bull attacks, most surviving victims suffer PTSD, a lifelong struggle.
A Texas hospital study found that attacks by pit bulls are associated with higher morbidity rates, higher hospital charges, and a higher risk of death than are attacks by other breeds of dogs. Out of 334 dog attacks studied, one-third of the attacks were caused by pit bull terriers and resulted in the highest rate of consultation (94%) as well as 5 times the relative rate of surgical intervention. Imagine the impact of this disproportionate use of resources in hospitals across the U.S. In addition, a 2014 UC Davis (Pediatrics) research document is part of a growing body of scientific evidence showing that pit bulls, unprovoked, inflict much more damage than all other dog breeds. On top of the extreme costs to the medical institutions themselves, rarely do pit bull owners help pay medical expenses, which are typically borne by victims and taxpayers. The average pit bull injury starts at $25,000 and quickly goes beyond. For more information, see http://blog.dogsbite.org/2008/04/flashback-pit-bull-problem-is-over-20.html
“Business/Economy”.
PIT BULLS ARE A TAXPAYER ISSUE
animal-controlIn addition to the toll they take on victims, pit bulls are the most overbred and euthanized dogs in North America, with taxpayers subsidizing the euthanization of more than 1 million pit bulls in shelters every year. Attacking pit bulls are quarantined and/or held in shelters, sometimes for over a year, with taxpayers subsidizing their boarding.
Example: For the investigation of dog attacks and dealing with dangerous dogs, the cost to taxpayers of Animal Services in the Portland, Oregon area (where pit bulls have attacked 8 times more than the next breed of dog) totalled more than $3 million in the fiscal year 2015.
About two-thirds of the dogs in U.S. shelters as of June 2014 were housed by tax-funded animal care and control facilities, and of those, 34% were pit bulls.
The collateral cost of managing the current pit bull crisis in North America far exceeds the cost of monitoring restrictions on pit bull type dogs, including mandatory spay/neutering. The costs rise exponentially every year. In 1999, pit bulls were about 3% of the U.S. dog population, but accounted for 17% of shelter dog admissions. Since 2000, pit bulls have increased to about 5% of the U.S. dog population, but were about 25% of shelter dog admissions and 50% of the dogs killed in shelters during the 10 years ending in 2009. Pit bulls since 2010 have increased to almost a third of shelter dog admissions nationally, and more than 60 % of the dogs killed in shelters. For more information, see Dogsbite.org
History.
“Trash” dogs
Pit bulls rose to popularity through the sale of castoffs from fighting dog breeders, a practice pioneered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by dogfighters John P. Colby of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Charles Werner of New Orleans, Louisiana. Colby, founder of the Staffordshire Club of America, produced dogs who in 1909 killed his own two-year-old nephew, Bert Colby Leadbetter, and later injured several other children.
But the times have changed. Today most dogfighters make use of the seemingly endless supply of abandoned pit bulls bred and sold as pets.
Unlike in Colby and Werner’s time, and in 1961, when dogs sold to fight were often identified in print with long pedigrees, most fighting dogs impounded in recent years have been about as anonymous as dogs could be. Many, perhaps most, have not even had names until names were given to them by rescuers. Often the dogs were stolen, picked up free-to-good-home after failing as pets, or were bought for a song from backyard breeders who had already dealt their most aggressive pups to people who sought them to guard drug operations, to help in other criminal activities, or just to strut around their neighborhoods.
Pit bull offered for adoption by the Associated Humane Societies’ Tinton Falls shelter.
Soaring shelter intake
Even as the number of pit bulls who are actually fought has apparently doubled since 1961, shelter intake of pit bulls has soared from under 1% of the dogs received then to more than a third from 2010 through 2015, and from less than 2% of the dogs killed in shelters then to more 60% since 2010.
U.S. shelters have since 2000 taken in more than a million pit bulls per year: nearly 1,000 times more than the total impounded from dogfighters.
Most of these pit bulls have been bred to feed what in Britain is called the “status dog” market. These tend to be purchasers who want to show off that they have a scary dog, but prefer that the dog will not do anything that actually lands them in court.
Almost a third of the U.S. pit bull population have been surrendered to animal shelters, or have been impounded for dangerous behavior, each and every year of this century. At any given time about a third of the pit bulls in the U.S. are under a year of age. About half of all adult pit bulls in homes right now will not be in those homes a year from now.
(See Pound dog inventory down, no-kill inventory up, in 2015 shelter survey.)
Swamped with pit bulls just as public expectations have risen that shelters should go “no kill,” many humane societies promote the very myths––including as the fiction invented in 1971 by pit bull breeder and advocate Lilian Rant that pit bulls were once used as “nanny dogs”––that often lead to fatal and disfiguring accidents.
Shelter adopters in the post-Vick era have been sold on taking home pit bulls at about three times the rate at which people buying dogs from breeders choose pit bulls. This has had grim results.
A pit bull recently rehomed by the Asheville Humane Society after passing the ASPCA’s “Safer” test on July 7, 2015 fatally mauled six-year-old Joshua Philip Strother.
Rehoming killers
Only two dogs rehomed by U.S. animal shelters killed anyone between 1858 and 2000. These were a pair of wolf hybrids who were rehomed in 1988 and 1989.
Forty-three shelter dogs have participated in killing people since 2010, 29 of them pit bulls, and nine of them mixes of pit bull with mastiff, along with three Rottweilers, a Lab who may have been part pit bull, and a husky.
Shelter outcomes in rehoming pit bulls reflect the experience of the nation. As of 1961, pit bulls had killed nine of the fifteen Americans who had been killed by dogs since 1930. The U.S. pit bull population has increased twelvefold since then, but pit bulls since 2010 have killed an average of 30 people per year, an increase of more than 60-fold in the rate of fatal attacks.
The above is an excerpt from the article:
How to stop dogfighting the quick, easy way
https://www.animals24-7.org/2015/11/27/how-to-stop-dogfighting-the-quick-easy-way/
November 27, 2015 by Merritt Clifton
“You can say you like dogs but it doesn’t come across that way. All I see is you hate dogs and are afraid of them. You aren’t alone either. More than a few agree with you but again; what does it have to do with politics or religion? I see the occasional outlier threads about off the wall subjects but this one has been consistent.”
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We are not discussing dogs generically here.
We are discussing the death, damage, carnage, and costs of the ownership of dogfighting breeds of dogs (AKA Pit-bulls and there closely related breeds) as pets by the general public.
Qui Bono? (Who benefits?)
Follow the money.
“There are plenty of stats that show pits can be deadly, but for some reason there is no publicity.”
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There is more publicity now.
When I began asking friends and family about these dogs, I found a large number of them had been attacked, knew someone who had, or had had a pet injured or killed by one. When I hear that it has happened again, I send the injured party (and the dog owner, if I can get an email address) these websites which have the information that they can use to assist in the process of healing or legal issues, or at the very least to let them know that they are not alone:
https://www.nationalpitbullvictimawareness.org/
https://www.nationalpitbullvictimawareness.org/pit-bull-lobby/
https://www.animals24-7.org/2017/08/08/pit-stop-archive/
Regarding the “no publicity” item you mentioned, I would check the “pit-bull-lobby” item above. You will also find a number of articles regarding this on the “animals24-7” website.
Charles Danten earned his undergraduate degree in agricultural sciences program at MacDonald College, McGill University, and his veterinary science degree from the University of Montreal. A practicing veterinarian for 18 years, Danten now works as a scientific translator.
His books include Un vétérinaire en colère (1999, reissued in 2008 in Spanish as Un veterinario encolerizado); Le prix du bonheur. Le mythe de l’animal-roi (2013, published in English as The Price of Happiness: The Myth of the Animal King);
and Slaves of Our Affection: The Myth of the Happy Pet(2015).
Pretty sure this is him. Animal Liberation Front? He’s a nutcase.
Would you mind posting an excerpt from the website? Thank you in advance.
I posted a link; follow it.
I have had problems in the past with clickbait and ad malware with links provided by persons I do not know, so I do my best to provide at least a short excerpt when directing people to links. Thank you, Norski.
‘A Vet Gone to the Dogs Speech presented to the Montreal Rotary Club on January 6, 2000
by Charles Danten
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, guests and members of the Montreal Rotary Club.
I think you all saw my book last time I was here. Here it is again: it’s called An Angry Veterinarian: Essay on the Animal Condition.
Well, I’m here today to give you a few insights on its content, and to tell you why I’ve “gone to the dogs.”
Do not let the title misguide you though. Although I was angry at one time, you cannot tell by reading this book. It is a rather soft-spoken book.
Through personal anecdotes it explores our relationship with pets. It takes an original, inside look at the pet animal industry — from the consumer to the producer, from the healers to the animal defenders.
In this book I stick to facts and make very few comments or judgment calls. It’s meant to be a very serious and academic book, clinically documented by over forty pages of notes, references, and tables — the result of twenty years of reflection and three years of writing.
Although some parts of the information it contains are known to many of you, few have ever seen the big picture and in such detail. The result is very surprising and, I would say, quite disturbing.
You see, we all tend to think, or rather, we like to believe that overall, pets are well treated by our society — as well as, sometimes even better than our own children.
Our relationship with pets is thought to be a reflection of our humanity, and we tend to equate the ownership of an animal with love, respect, and compassion.
As I will attempt to demonstrate, perception is seldom reality.
There’s a darker side to all this, and until we look into it, it’s hardly possible to bring a meaningful change.
From the beginning of my career, I was never quite comfortable with my job and what our society is doing to animals and nature.
I could never reconcile the welfare of my patients and animals in general with the interests of my clients and my financial obligations.
You see, vets are not as much at the service of animals as they are at the service of their clients.
They pay his bills, and to be successful, he has to make a lot of concessions that I was unable to make eventually.
We have a very romantic idea about what a vet actually does. We all think he spends his days like James Herriot, that famous English vet, flying to the rescue of sick and injured animals.
Although that part of his work does exist, rather than curative, the work of a vet in general practice is mostly preventive and very routine.
He is responsible for the alteration, the maintenance, the repair, and disposal of a commodity that we are consuming in unprecedented quantities.
He softens and humanizes the use of animals, but he also condones it by his silence, his active promotion, and cooperation. ‘
Yeah, this former vet is a freaking nutjob. Anyone who associates with ‘liberation’ be it animals or earth is an extremist sociopath. Screw him.
Yes, while the above is posted on the ALF page, this is actually the transcript of :
A Vet Gone to the Dogs Speech
presented to the Montreal Rotary Club on January 6, 2000
by Charles Danten
. . .”Technologically, we have come a long way since the invention of fire and the wheel, but as far as our behavior is concerned, we are still very primitive.”
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It is worse than that. His is not a world view with which I agree, but on this one particular point, he is correct.
In addition, as a veterinarian, he did have to deal with huge amounts of animal euthanasia every day, which is a difficult part of a practice, and when he could deal with it no more, gave up his practice. This “burnout” is also common among animal control personnel.
Please note: The subject of the article he wrote (15 years later) and I excerpted at the beginning of this post was of the problem of “humanization” or elevation of animals to the status of humans. This problem is common as pet owners (”Furbabies”, “pet parents”) and absolutely endemic among pit bull advocates, and as such is a part of the pit bull carnage epidemic problem. Such humanization of animals is “inordinate affection” and constitutes idolatry.
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“Yeah, this former vet is a freaking nutjob. Anyone who associates with ‘liberation’ be it animals or earth is an extremist sociopath. Screw him.”
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And so, while this former veterinarian appears to have a pagan worldview and at the time of that speech, had a more tender heart towards animals (by his words)than humans, I would not call him names, especially not such as these.
I find that calling people names in forum indiscriminately is common behavior pit bull advocates.
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ANIMALS are NOT humans, and must never be treated or regarded as such.
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Proverbs 12:10
“A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
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OK. Well, you hate pitbulls, that’s great. Its your lot in life. Carry on. Whatever.
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