OMG 2 pit bull just terrorized my development. Updated 7/24

[ozarkmom]

If a dog was attacking my child, I don't think I'd take the time to get it to a shelter or a vet.

Exactly we have pets but if a dog of ours or anyone elses was attacking my child getting it to the vet would be my last thought.

 

[eliza61]

I wonder if this thread would've been started had a mutt got out and attacked the yorkie. All dogs are territorial. And this happens quite a bit. The only time the issue gets raised is when alarmist hear "Pitbull"

Op here,
To answer your question. YES. watching a small dog being mauled is not pretty, yes it happened to be 2 pit bulls but if it were 2 large mutts, I'm thinking it would have been just as bad. If it had been 3 poodles we (the neighbors outside at the time) would have probably tried to grab the dogs but yesterday I was not an alarmist, yesterday I was plain scared. Right now I'm more mad simply because 2 LARGE dogs were let loose in a cul de sac with tons of children. My youngest son who called the cops is a wrestler on his h.s. wrestling team in the heavy weight division, he is over 6ft 210lbs at 15 years and I didn't want him to step foot out of the garage.

Sorry Dude, I'll proudly wear the "alarmist" tag.

 

[Hollywoodhaha]

My daughter was mauled by a neighbor's Pit Bull (which was previously one of the many big lovable babies who could not harm you unless you consider its tendency to lick you to death... ...until it snapped that is) a few summers ago. Frankly, I would have been happy to put a bullet through its head. Instead I had to take my daughter to the ER and watch her go through months and months of pain to recover from the deep infections and the chipped bones and the damaged nerve endings. Ever hear your sweet innocent 14 year old crying in pain at night months after she was attacked? No? Well, when you know what that feels like, get back with me and let me know how you feel about giving a bullet to the dog that did it to your child. You just may change your mind.

Oh, and for those who are waiting to throw the "it must have been a bad owner" theory at me, this guy had his dog professionally trained when it was a puppy and he adored his dog, treated it like he would a member of his family. He was playing frisbee with the dog and it saw my daugher and rushed away from its owner to attack my kid....and no, she didn't provoke him. In fact, the dog knew her quite well.

And by the way, there are non-vindictive reasons for shooting a violent dog on the spot. Frankly, if an animal just mauled somebody, do you really want to handle it long enough to take it to the vet? About two years before my daughter was attacked, another Pit Bull attacked the girl who lived next door to me. That dog was also a big lovable baby, by the way. That woman laid in the driveway bleeding, meanwhile the dog ran off and bit two pre-teen boys. I'm thinking the mother of those boys would have preferred it if somebody had given that dog a bullet or two before it made a second and third victim of her children.

Kind of hard for me to comment when I DON'T HAVE children considering I am a teenager. But, I know a family friend who took their dog out into the woods to shoot it JUST BECAUSE it barked all the time. Not at people, no, just barked for the heck of it. Shooting dogs just doesn't seem right no matter what they do. To me, it is no better than the people who I read about that go to jail for shooting a girlfriends dog or something.

But, anyways .. everyone has their opinion.

OP, I hope the dog is doing fine. How is she/he, if you know..

 

[SnowWtch]

Were the babies who got hurt okay? I can't stand it when little dogs get hurt by someone's carelessness. Last year the mastiff across the street made a beeline for my baby who was minding her own business in our front yard. My mom protected her but wound up getting knocked over and breaking her ankle. Arwen was traumatized for months after that and didn't want to go outside to potty and every time she heard that dog bark she froze even if she was in the house.

 

[java]

Hoping the dog is on the mend. I am not against a breed of dogs. But I will fess up to not letting my kids play at 2 houses in my neighborhood. One has an Akita that has attacked dogs in the neighborhood. The family doesn't care for the dog. Aggression issues. Really in this case I can say THE OWNERS are the problem with that dog.
The other dog is a bullie mix- pit bull is in there as a 50%. He is a sweet dog. We play with him when he is on a leash. He particularly loves adults- kids not so much (which is why my kids don't play there) he was a rescue from a fighting ring- he was a bait dog. Just horrible. But with that backround I fear what could snap in him. So we'll just be careful around him. It's amazing watching him change in this loving environment. His tail is the big telling factor. When he first got here his tail was between his legs at all times- just sullen. Now that tail is wagging as he bounds along on his walk.
It breaks my heart that I am labeling him because of his past - but when it comes to my kids I have to.

 

[ckay87]

Forget it

 

[momrek06]

Op here,
To answer your question. YES. watching a small dog being mauled is not pretty, yes it happened to be 2 pit bulls but if it were 2 large mutts, I'm thinking it would have been just as bad. If it had been 3 poodles we (the neighbors outside at the time) would have probably tried to grab the dogs but yesterday I was not an alarmist, yesterday I was plain scared. Right now I'm more mad simply because 2 LARGE dogs were let loose in a cul de sac with tons of children. My youngest son who called the cops is a wrestler on his h.s. wrestling team in the heavy weight division, he is over 6ft 210lbs at 15 years and I didn't want him to step foot out of the garage.

Sorry Dude, I'll proudly wear the "alarmist" tag.

WOW, OP, I am so sorry you had to go through something like this...and then the nightmares. Sad. Please keep us updated as to how the Yorkie is doing.

Our complex here does not allow PitBulls or Rottweilers. AND all pooches must be on a lease 24/7 if out of the owners apt. Huge fines in our complex if a resident does not adhere to the pet rules of the complex that are stated clearly in our lease.

 

[BCV513]

some person made those dogs mean. and that is what really gets me. animals aren't born with meanness like that. thats a human trait.

i feel really bad for your neighbor's dogs. and i'm glad everyone had the presence of mind to act the way they did. i hope no more dogs get loose in your neighborhood.

when i was younger i remember the dogs that got loose were rottweilers, and my mom wouldn't let me go outside. i didn't really understand why until i was older.

You really don't think animals are born mean? I bet you've never run across a mountain lion in the woods before. (For the record, I haven't either, but I'm guessing they're pretty mean and haven't had much human contact)

OP, I'm so sorry you had to witness that. I hope the Yorkie will be okay.

 

[starnightstarsky2000]

Hmm,
I am going to reply to several past post in this post as well as add my own in take. However first I want to tell you all a short story about a pit bull mixed puppy. A couple of years ago when we lived in KCMO my husband walked into our kitchen and said "Well you don't belong to us" turning around I saw a little brown pit/boxer mix puppy sitting at our back glass door. Now mind you this was the week before Thanksgiving and that means there was about 5 inches of snow on the ground and we hadn't seen the sun or the temp rise above 20 degrees for weeks. I sent my son into his bedroom, suited up and went outside. As I wildlife rescuer and shelter volunteer as well as vet tech I approached the puppy who was at a guess 12 weeks old. The second I opened the door she ran to me and dropped to her butt right next to my feet. Her nose was blue she was shivering and there was a clear layer of frost over her body. I saw she was wearing a pink collar and so grabbed the towel I had brought out with me and the leash. When she saw the leash she starts to lick my hand and tried to rub herself against me. I snapped the leash onto her and wrapping her up in the towel I took her straight into the house and into the concrete floors utility room and after turning and locking the door I proceeded to dry her off and check her over. She was clearly underfed but very friendly. As that was a Sunday I made up a bed for her and let took a picture of her and let her in the room with food and water. Then I made up black and white copies of the dog pick and a sign. We went around posting them all over our neighborhood listing on that we had found a small brown puppy with a collar. We listed our number and waited to be contacted by this puppy's family. Two months went by after the vet had cleared her of all medical possible problems and she had settled in nicely in our home. We named her Love Pup because she was so full of love. She followed us everywhere and Patrick adored her as did we all. I am an extreme brittle diabetic and one night when DH was at work I tried to lay down to go to sleep. I was recovering from the stomach flu. Well LOVE PUP refused to let me go to sleep every time I would start to fall asleep she would wake me up. Finally I was so out of sourced I called DH and he was like Check your blood sugar. So I did it was So high my machine wouldn't read it. My machine went up to 600mg. Needless to say he rushed home and rushed me to the hospital where they covered me in boiling hot towels to get a vein to pop up to give me straight insulin and fliuds. The doctors were very clear on the fact that I was minutes away from going into a diabetic coma when they finally got the IV in. Thanks to that little love pup I walked out of that hospital a week later and will be watching my DS enter the 3rd grade this year. However my story doesn't end there a week later we arrived home to see every police and animal control care in KCMO a couple of streets over from us with lights and sirens blaring. They had broken up a new record high pit bull dog fighting ring. A couple of days later our phone rang DH answered and the man on the phone was like "umm yea I think you found my dog" and we were like "Oh can you describe it" he was like "Its small and brown and was wearing a collar (which was how we had described it on the found dog posters). DH asked him if he could tell him the gender of the dog "umm female I think umm yea female" Well needless to say DH informed him that we had turned the dog into the KCMO pound weeks ago..as I petted Love Pup at his feet. We turned the phone number into the police as a possible dog fighting ring location and it was and they saved some more dogs and took some more people off to jail. However we felt since it was pretty clear that either Love Pup was one of their bait dogs or was very possibly from a fighting dog line that we rehome her since we had no plans on moving and were worried not about her attacking anyone but of them coming and stealing her. So we found a wonderful older family with like 40 acrea in the country to take her. I still get phone calls from the new owner as well as cards and pictures of her once a year.

Now having told my story I want to reply to some posted on here:

1.) Pit Bulls were bred to hunt bulls that is what the breed was created to do just as Chows were bred to hunt bear and Brittany's were bred to hunt and retrieve birds. However like so many things the pit lines have very badly inbred with other "high aggressive breds" to create an even more aggressive bred that we have today. Love Pup was a wonderful puppy and has grown up into a wonderful dog but both our family and her new family never fail to remember what her bred was created for. Pit bulls can be great family dogs but they can also be great junk yard guard dogs and hunters of anything smaller then them. Therefore just as everyone saids these are not dogs who should be around small children nor with people who don't know how to respect and raise these dog and even then they accept the risk they are taking with these kinds of dogs.

2.) You can NOT however say that they are evil dogs any more then you can say Cockier Spaniels are evil dogs even though they are the dog most reported every year for dog bites.

3.) This was a terrible event that eliza and her family as well as the others who had to see dogs attack people and my heart goes out to them all I can only image the nightmares many of you have had. And I wish we lived in a fair world where every dog was thought of as sweet as a puppy and taken care of with love and acceptance no matter what bred they are. However as yet that world doesn't exist I hope to raise my son so that perhaps some day in the future it will become this world.

 

[luvmy3]

It is always a human's fault if two dogs are roaming around free! How did they get out? My dog is NEVER OUT ALONE. We have a 6 foot locked vinyl fence and he is also never out alone. It's called being responsible.

Agreed.

News that dogs with poor owners attacked someone is horrible, but the cause of the problem is the bad owners.

While I agree that it is always the owners fault that dogs get out of their yards or home, it is not always the owners fault for the behavior of their dog who viciously attacks another dog or god forbid a child. We've had a few "breakouts" in our neighborhood, not one person or animal was attacked when it happened. Some dogs will attack on instinct and any dog that does that outside of their yard is just as capable of doing it inside it too.
Not every attack is done by a dog with bad owners, some are done by bad dogs. Its a shame a few of the posters here had children who had to find that fact out. Rebelmom67 and The Orchid, I'm so sorry for your dd's and I hope they have healed emotionally and physically from their attacks

 

[C.Ann]

My daughter was bitten by our own sweet Cupcake when she was 9 years old; completely provoked, however, because Cupcake had a turkey wing she stole from the trash can, and DD went to take it from her. That one bite on the hand was enough to teach DD a valuable lesson. I truly cannot imagine having to deal with what you did, Orchid. How is your daughter now?

Our dogs do not. they know I am the boss so is DW.

I can pull their food away, I can stick my fingers in their mouth while they are chewing and they will not bite.


I hope there is news, soon, that the two pits have been extinguished.


Mikeeee

This was the situation with all of the dogs we got as pups as well.. They were trained from day one to allow anyone to take food right out of their mouths, take their bowl of food away, take toys out of their mouths, take bones away, etc.. Even growling wasn't an option..

News that dogs with poor owners attacked someone is horrible, but the cause of the problem is the bad owners.

While we would all like to believe that, it's simply not true.. As in the quote underneath this, these dogs have been known to attack family members right in their own homes - with no provacation at all.. They weren't running loose and they weren't bad owners.. The dogs just "snapped" - as these particular dogs have a tendency to do..

My BIL had a Pit Bull . Well this dog was LOVED. Was raised with cats and another dog. My 2 year old nephew was standing at the back door waiting for his mom to take him out. The dog walked up to him and bit his face.He wasn't provoked wasn't trained to be this way.He just snapped. Well he was put to sleep. He was a big baby before that. Just like everybody else was saying there dog would never do this.Well you don't know they can just snap!!! They thought they knew their dog too. My nephew is now 13 and still has the scars on his face..

I don't care how well these dogs have been trained - how sweet and cuddly they are - how much they love to lick someone's face - I don't trust them and never will.. The risk is too high..

 

[Hollywoodhaha]

Hmm,
I am going to reply to several past post in this post as well as add my own in take. However first I want to tell you all a short story about a pit bull mixed puppy. A couple of years ago when we lived in KCMO my husband walked into our kitchen and said "Well you don't belong to us" turning around I saw a little brown pit/boxer mix puppy sitting at our back glass door. Now mind you this was the week before Thanksgiving and that means there was about 5 inches of snow on the ground and we hadn't seen the sun or the temp rise above 20 degrees for weeks. I sent my son into his bedroom, suited up and went outside. As I wildlife rescuer and shelter volunteer as well as vet tech I approached the puppy who was at a guess 12 weeks old. The second I opened the door she ran to me and dropped to her butt right next to my feet. Her nose was blue she was shivering and there was a clear layer of frost over her body. I saw she was wearing a pink collar and so grabbed the towel I had brought out with me and the leash. When she saw the leash she starts to lick my hand and tried to rub herself against me. I snapped the leash onto her and wrapping her up in the towel I took her straight into the house and into the concrete floors utility room and after turning and locking the door I proceeded to dry her off and check her over. She was clearly underfed but very friendly. As that was a Sunday I made up a bed for her and let took a picture of her and let her in the room with food and water. Then I made up black and white copies of the dog pick and a sign. We went around posting them all over our neighborhood listing on that we had found a small brown puppy with a collar. We listed our number and waited to be contacted by this puppy's family. Two months went by after the vet had cleared her of all medical possible problems and she had settled in nicely in our home. We named her Love Pup because she was so full of love. She followed us everywhere and Patrick adored her as did we all. I am an extreme brittle diabetic and one night when DH was at work I tried to lay down to go to sleep. I was recovering from the stomach flu. Well LOVE PUP refused to let me go to sleep every time I would start to fall asleep she would wake me up. Finally I was so out of sourced I called DH and he was like Check your blood sugar. So I did it was So high my machine wouldn't read it. My machine went up to 600mg. Needless to say he rushed home and rushed me to the hospital where they covered me in boiling hot towels to get a vein to pop up to give me straight insulin and fliuds. The doctors were very clear on the fact that I was minutes away from going into a diabetic coma when they finally got the IV in. Thanks to that little love pup I walked out of that hospital a week later and will be watching my DS enter the 3rd grade this year. However my story doesn't end there a week later we arrived home to see every police and animal control care in KCMO a couple of streets over from us with lights and sirens blaring. They had broken up a new record high pit bull dog fighting ring. A couple of days later our phone rang DH answered and the man on the phone was like "umm yea I think you found my dog" and we were like "Oh can you describe it" he was like "Its small and brown and was wearing a collar (which was how we had described it on the found dog posters). DH asked him if he could tell him the gender of the dog "umm female I think umm yea female" Well needless to say DH informed him that we had turned the dog into the KCMO pound weeks ago..as I petted Love Pup at his feet. We turned the phone number into the police as a possible dog fighting ring location and it was and they saved some more dogs and took some more people off to jail. However we felt since it was pretty clear that either Love Pup was one of their bait dogs or was very possibly from a fighting dog line that we rehome her since we had no plans on moving and were worried not about her attacking anyone but of them coming and stealing her. So we found a wonderful older family with like 40 acrea in the country to take her. I still get phone calls from the new owner as well as cards and pictures of her once a year.

Now having told my story I want to reply to some posted on here:

1.) Pit Bulls were bred to hunt bulls that is what the breed was created to do just as Chows were bred to hunt bear and Brittany's were bred to hunt and retrieve birds. However like so many things the pit lines have very badly inbred with other "high aggressive breds" to create an even more aggressive bred that we have today. Love Pup was a wonderful puppy and has grown up into a wonderful dog but both our family and her new family never fail to remember what her bred was created for. Pit bulls can be great family dogs but they can also be great junk yard guard dogs and hunters of anything smaller then them. Therefore just as everyone saids these are not dogs who should be around small children nor with people who don't know how to respect and raise these dog and even then they accept the risk they are taking with these kinds of dogs.

2.) You can NOT however say that they are evil dogs any more then you can say Cockier Spaniels are evil dogs even though they are the dog most reported every year for dog bites.

3.) This was a terrible event that eliza and her family as well as the others who had to see dogs attack people and my heart goes out to them all I can only image the nightmares many of you have had. And I wish we lived in a fair world where every dog was thought of as sweet as a puppy and taken care of with love and acceptance no matter what bred they are. However as yet that world doesn't exist I hope to raise my son so that perhaps some day in the future it will become this world.

I agree very much.
When we got my grandmas dog, Angel, at about a few weeks at a shelter, she was in a cage totally different than other dogs. Her cage was chained up and had about 5 big locks on it to stop dog fighting people to steal her.

 

[Sheree Bobbins]

I have heard too many stories of vicious pit bull attacks to ever think they should be family pets. The danger is too great.

 

[luvsJack]

You really don't think animals are born mean? I bet you've never run across a mountain lion in the woods before. (For the record, I haven't either, but I'm guessing they're pretty mean and haven't had much human contact)

OP, I'm so sorry you had to witness that. I hope the Yorkie will be okay.

A mountain lion does not attack a human because they are mean. The do it because they are a wild animal and are protecting themselves, protecting their young or maybe hungry--who know why but it is not because they are mean. Like the other poster said, that is a human trait.

 

[mlynn]

This was the situation with all of the dogs we got as pups as well.. They were trained from day one to allow anyone to take food right out of their mouths, take their bowl of food away, take toys out of their mouths, take bones away, etc.. Even growling wasn't an option..



While we would all like to believe that, it's simply not true.. As in the quote underneath this, these dogs have been known to attack family members right in their own homes - with no provacation at all.. They weren't running loose and they weren't bad owners.. The dogs just "snapped" - as these particular dogs have a tendency to do..



I don't care how well these dogs have been trained - how sweet and cuddly they are - how much they love to lick someone's face - I don't trust them and never will.. The risk is too high..

This was my point. The dog was loved and turned on my nephew.I don't trust them at all. He was only love and he still snapped!I wouldn't ever take the risk with my children.

 

[maggs]

Never heard of that! Learn something new every day.

What are the other 3 kinds of dogs?

The others are the Japanese Tosa, the Dogo Argentino, and the Fila Brazileiro.

Maggs

 

[OceanAnnie]

The others are the Japanese Tosa, the Dogo Argentino, and the Fila Brazileiro.

Maggs

Thanks. That's interesting! I'm not familiar with the other breeds. I wonder if there was very much opposition to the act? I'm also curious as to legal action because of noncompliance. I'm going to google it, but I'd love to hear your perspective as well.

 

[RNMOM]

There are a lot of people on this board who defend pit bulls because of their own experiences with them. There are an equal or greater number who fear them for the same reason. I am a dog person and have always had a dog but there are a few breeds that scare me. I am lucky that I don't have neighbors who own them and don't honestly know what I would do if they did.

We all need to understand that dogs are animals and will follow their instincts sometimes and it might not be an instinct we are comfortable with. I know my dog is a pussycat but would never leave him alone with a young child because he is a dog. When my boys were little we always supervised them and the dogs were right there with them. We never had anything more serious than a licked face that caused the youngest to plop down on his behind in the dog water dish. Poor kid was startled but certainly not harmed but the dog thought he did something wrong.

I think mostly we need to respect one another and if you feel in your heart that it is okay to own a dog whose breed is known to be agressive or dangerous you need to take all the precautions possible because, unfortunately, it might not be you or your kid who pays the consequences. I can't imagine how horrible I would feel if my animal harmed anyone, especially a child.

 

[Rebelmom67]

Did you really shoot the dog?

Yes, after wrestling the dog off my daughter, I had her head wrapped in a towel and trying to control the bleeding while calling an ambulance. My husband got the shotgun, retrieved the dog out of the bathroom (where he had him contained after the incident) and took care of business. I offer no apologies.

 

[JerseyMamaBear]

Op here,
To answer your question. YES. watching a small dog being mauled is not pretty, yes it happened to be 2 pit bulls but if it were 2 large mutts, I'm thinking it would have been just as bad. If it had been 3 poodles we (the neighbors outside at the time) would have probably tried to grab the dogs but yesterday I was not an alarmist, yesterday I was plain scared. Right now I'm more mad simply because 2 LARGE dogs were let loose in a cul de sac with tons of children. My youngest son who called the cops is a wrestler on his h.s. wrestling team in the heavy weight division, he is over 6ft 210lbs at 15 years and I didn't want him to step foot out of the garage.

Sorry Dude, I'll proudly wear the "alarmist" tag.

I was going to post a simular responce to defend your post. Like you said, it could hav e been any dog attack and you would have been just as shaken. Rightfully so. You were shaken up and turned to friends to lend you support. Your not an alarmist, just a caring person.

Kind of hard for me to comment when I DON'T HAVE children considering I am a teenager. But, I know a family friend who took their dog out into the woods to shoot it JUST BECAUSE it barked all the time. Not at people, no, just barked for the heck of it. Shooting dogs just doesn't seem right no matter what they do. To me, it is no better than the people who I read about that go to jail for shooting a girlfriends dog or something.
But, anyways .. everyone has their opinion.
..

Your right, the situation you stated with your friends dog is a terrible act of cruelity and could have been handled differently. However, IMO, and Im sure others as well, human life is far more superior then that of any animal and there will be times when you must kill an animal to protect human life. You dont have to be a parent to value the life of another over a dog.