More on Dogs
Another thing that’s got me off-kilter today is that a new family has moved into a house at the end of the street, and they’ve got three bullmastiffs in their yard.
I don’t have a general problem with the bullmastiff breed. I mean, it’s not like they’re pit bulls. But I have a problem with these three dogs.
A bullmastiff is totally capable of ripping a three year old child to shreds in seconds, and these particular bullmastiffs are obviously convinced that their job is to scare away anybody who happens to get too close to their property. Unfortunately, “too close” includes the sidewalk, and in particular a stretch of sidewalk that we walk down twice each day—once to go to the park, and once to come back.
They’re behind a wrought iron fence. A wrought iron fence that has lots of gaps in it. And my three year old is CRAZY about dogs, ADORES them, wants nothing more in his whole soul than to get up right next to them and pat them and be licked by them, and when he sees three bullmastiffs leaping around behind a wrought iron fence and barking their heads off—barking a message that to an adult human translates very clearly to “Put a toe on my property and I will FUCK YOU UP”—what he thinks is “Ooh! Doggies!”
It just makes our daily walk a lot more stressful. And that family has a kid (an older kid, but still) living there, too. Why on earth would you want three big angry aggro dogs in a house with kids? It’s senseless.
January 19th, 2011 at 8:56 am
eeeeeeeeeeee that site was informatively scary. there are a LOT of pits in b’more (major dogfighting problem). good thing i am not letting Silas leave the house ever.
January 19th, 2011 at 9:19 am
Oakland has the same dogfighting issue. The shelters are clogged with pits and you read about stray pits (and sometimes pits that aren’t strays, just off-leash) attacking people all the frickin’ time.
There was an incident just a couple weeks ago–I saw the headline “Loose Dogs Attack Elderly Man” and clicked it just to see if they were pit bulls. OF COURSE they were pit bulls, it’s always pit bulls. This week the local pit-bull mauling story involves a 10 year old in Vallejo, but there’s a new story every single week and it’s ALWAYS pit bulls.
I was terrified once when I was getting the kids out of the car and an off-leash pit came running straight up to me, bounded right onto our porch. I grabbed Robin and yelled “You get the hell away from us!!!” in my scariest voice, and it backed off. Turns out the dog is owned by the neighbors across the street and, to be fair, it didn’t bark or growl or exhibit any signs of aggression. Scared the crap out of me though. It was just so obvious that if it *had* decided to go for Robin there’d be literally nothing I could do to stop it.
San Francisco has a mandatory pit bull sterilization law that Oakland really ought to adopt as well. It seems to me to be a much better way of addressing the problem than, say, making pit ownership illegal, which has bad ramifications for a lot of existing dogs.
January 19th, 2011 at 9:20 am
I solved our bullmastiff problem, though, by finding another route to the park that doesn’t take us by that house.