Pit bulls attack Marlborough woman and her dog while on walk (Massachusetts)

OK here ya go...

I’ve been attacked by both Collie and Lab.

A collie bit my lip when I was 10, I think by accident, shredded top and bottom lip, took 56 stitches. I got lucky, a plastic surgeon was on duty in the emergency room...pure luck...48 stitches on the outside, could be covered with a dime (literally) and 6 on the lower inside, just below the gumline where it ripped the lip away from the gums. 50 years later I can still feel the scar tissue.

Talk about luck, the guy was good, I ended up with only a hairline scar across each lip, the upper one vertical, the lower one two directions. I passed out when he stuck a needle in to deaden it...

Many years later I looked out my window, probably 15 years ago, and saw a black lab, probably 4 to 5 months old, peeing in my garden, where I had transplanted 2 inch tomato plants the night before. (I always transplant just before dark, 90% success rate because they have overnight to recuperate.) I had no idea where the dog came from, first time I had ever seen it. Turned out the neighbor behind me had just gotten it.

I tried to chase the dog away, it jumped around all over the garden barking at me, finally left. Pissed on 3 tiny tomato plants, stomped on 4, killed all 7. Same story next day, but he didn’t manage to kill any plants.

That dog tried to attack me every time it saw me its entire life, until I moved out of state to help someone open a computer repair shop around 3 years later. It almost got me one day, came across my yard silent, snapped at my left elbow just as I turned to walk to a neighbor’s house. Missed by an inch. I had to carry my walking cane to go in my own back yard for 2 years. Out here in the boonies animal control wouldn’t do a thing about it. Dog’s owner wouldn’t tie the thing up. Sheriff’s deputy told me if I shot the dog I could get in more trouble than if I shot the owner. I knocked it down with the cane several times, it would stay away for a month or so, then start again. But as long as I had the cane, it would stay just out of reach of the cane, but still try to attack. If I didn’t have the cane, it was in my face.

That said, Pit Bulls are worse and I know it. The town I lived in before I moved back here is in northeast Louisiana, they had so many problems with Pitt Bulls they passed a city ordinance designating them dangerous animals. If you own a pitt, you have to keep it behind a 8 foot chain link fence, any time it is outside that fence it has to wear a muzzle and be on a strong leash no more than 4 feet long.

Dogsbite.org has some interesting statistics.

https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-quick-statistics.php

Most alarming is the observation that when attacks come from unfamiliar dogs, the pit bull was responsible for 60% and 63% of all injuries and ocular injuries, respectively.

Of the more than 8 different breeds identified, one-third were caused by pit bull terriers and resulted in the highest rate of consultation (94%) and had 5 times the relative rate of surgical intervention.

Just a couple of quotes from their quick statistics page...

Pitts got national attention from two stories. Nitwit football player named Michael Vick was busted with 25 of them he raised for dog fights. He tried to deny it, claimed his brother was the owner..Judge disagreed. A year later he was back on the football field, announcers blithering about what a great player he was...should heave been banned from football for life. He raised those dogs to fight to the death...and it’s ugly.

Then years later, a 12 year old kid was killed by the pitt bull he grew up with. People started taking their pitts to the pound, they were scared. For good reason. Those dogs have a long standing reputation for attacking their owners. I knew that in the 70’s.

My niece worked at the local pound, and got 3 of them, one eventually bit one of her friends in the face. One tried to bite me, missed because I had very loose pants on, it ripped a big section of the pants leg off, destroyed a good pair of pants. I had told her to keep the dog locked up in a bedroom I didn’t have to go in, she ignored me. (I was replacing all the PVC water pipes in her trailer.)

Another one killed a neighbor’s dog, she sent it back to her father’s house for a year because the police wanted to pick it up and have it euthanized. (different state 12 hours away.) Her father lived next door to me where I had to listen to it bark nonstop for several hours a day every time he put it outside, and refused to even admit it happened until I grabbed a pellet rifle and put one into the dog. 20 feet from my kitchen window, it was not fun. After the pellet rifle, he finally decided to put it inside when it started to bark, which was 3 minutes after he put it outside. If it had ever been able to get out of the fence, it would have definitely attacked someone, mean dog. It did get out one day, he managed to get it back inside before I could get my shotgun...he knew where I was headed...and why...

Vicious, unpredictable, dangerous dogs. Once they get mad they seem to go primitive and do not stop until their opponent is dead. That’s why they are used in dog fights, they ignore all injuries, keep trying to kill or be killed.

Mid 70’s I found out about them when a 4 or 5 year old boy was mauled by one in Houston and someone managed to get a video. How it happened that just by chance someone had a video camera filming the boy I don’t know, he was just running down the sidewalk to a friend’s house a couple of doors down. Nobody had cell phones with easily available video those days, cell phones were 20 years in the future. The dog hit the gate, which had not been closed right, and was on the boy before anyone could react.

A very large black woman nearby tried to pull the dog off with no luck, and this woman was around 220lbs. Dog ignored her. Finally another neighbor got there with a 2x4 or baseball bat, I can’t remember, and hit the dog 8 or 10 times, HARD before it finally decided to let go. And went after the guy with the board...this guy was bigger than I am and leaning into it...dog ignored him until he hit it at least 8 times.

Last I heard, the boy was waiting on his 5th reconstructive surgery 2 years later, doctors said he would never have full use of his left arm. All he did was run by the gate minding his own business, glad to be able to go play with a boy a couple of doors down.

The video was shown on the Houston news almost nightly for over a month. The dog grabbed the boy up and threw him around like a rag doll by his left arm. A petition was passed around to make pitt bulls illegal in Houston, they never got enough signatures to get city hall to do anything. I couldn’t sign it, I didn’t live in Houston proper.

I have more but I’ve rambled enough...

Thanks ‘2003. I don’t seem to remember him running down Sarah, I probably just wasn’t paying attention to that, but I do remember the endless Pit-Bull stories though. There were some pretty good flame wars over those!

“Someone really needs to do a compilation of all Pit Bull attacks stories here on FR.”

To do so, it is helpful to keyword: dog, dog attack, attack, death, mauling, pit, pit bull, and pitbull.

Many, if not most, of these stories are deleted because extreme pit bull advocates become extremely agitated and abusive, and the subject becomes a detraction to the website. I, myself, stopped posting them mostly for this reason. In addition, the abuse endured became a bit much.

If you desire information, here are three very informative sources.

https://www.animals24-7.org/2017/08/08/pit-stop-archive/

https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-index-dog-bite-studies.php

https://www.nationalpitbullvictimawareness.org/

Best Regards, Norski

Thanks. They’re just a violent animal. Why don’t folks admit it?

In 2009, in the magazine Psychology Today, a study on the owners of fighting and “bully” dog breeds was published. Quite interesting. It is still online. Perhaps this may shed some light on the subject. More can be found in the article bank at the websites given earlier. Thank you, Norski