"Court records show Willey has had several citations for owning a vicious dog, allowing a dog at large, and failing to have proper registration and vaccination papers. The citations, which resulted in fines totaling thousands of dollars, occurred in Tampa and dated to 2000…. Neighbors said the family had moved to the area within the past year. Recently, their dogs had been seen roaming wild. "A week ago, they were running through our backyard. They looked like two pit bulls," said Dawn Phillips, 44.
"Their dogs were out a lot and barked a lot," said Lou Righi, 54. "I was afraid because they were large and they looked mean. They were spooky."…
The Presa Canario was originally bred for fighting and guarding in the Canary Islands. They almost went extinct in the 1950s, but were perpetuated through breeding with mastiffs. A Presa Canario gained notoriety in January 2001, when it savagely killed a San Francisco woman. Its owner was sentenced to four years in prison."
Such a sweet looking breed. I don’t have a lot of sympathy. The kids are probably better off without a mom who’d have the freak as a pet.
The problem's more the combination of the owner and the breed than just the breed itself. A dog like that Presa is going to take a HUGE amount of socialization, constant supervision, and careful handling. There are some people out there that can handle it and turn a Presa into a good pet, but probably not that many.
My in-laws own three Hungarian Kuvasz, which are European sheep guard dogs (not herd dogs). They're big (males go about 90-110 pounds), and while they're not known for aggressiveness like bull terriers or Presas, they're VERY oriented toward their "pack" and their territory--they've got 600 years of livestock-guard breeding in their veins. So they're very smart and independent, which makes them a challenge to train and socialize.
Their youngest, a 75-pound female, was a holy terror when they first got her. It's taken them FOUR YEARS to socialize that dog to the point where she's reasonably good to take on a walk without going after another animal, and where she won't go nuts on people when they come over to visit. She's accepted the whole extended family as part of her "pack" now, and she's the sweetest dog I've ever seen now...to us. And even then they are very careful with her--she never goes off-leash, she's always closely supervised, and when my wife and infant daughter went down to visit, there were always adults nearby--as in, within grabbing distance, or with a hand on her collar or fur--when the dog and the baby were in the same room. They're very skilled at handling Kuvasz. If Shari (the dog) had ended up with an inexperienced or incompetent family, I guarantee you she'd be dead right now, either at the hands of another dog, in front of a car, or euthanized.
You can make any dog into a mean dog. And you can make (virtually) any dog into a nice dog. The problems arise when people who don't know what they're doing get a high-maintenance, dominance-oriented dog like a Presa and the dog ends up being a 125-pound time bomb. The dog's being a dog. It's the owners that are the problem.
}:-)4
Its a very sweet breed if people are sweet to it. Just like some people posted, the owners seem a little shady...ex-con, landscaper, 800,000 dollar home. Why are we blaming the dog here? This woman or another owner may have mistreated this dog. I read before that neighbors stated that the dog was often left tied up to a tree outside. Not the best way to treat a dog that can actually become higher than you on the food chain.