I was reading a news report earlier today about a group of children who were attacked by a pack of dogs- pit-bulls to be exact. One child cannot breath on her own, having suffered a punctured lung, one needed over 200 staples to close a leg wound, and the other was bitten all over her body. The 5 dogs escaped from their yard by digging a hole under the fence.
It got me thinking to a situation that happened to one of my sisters a few weeks ago:
My sister, her husband and my two nieces moved into a new house about a month and a half ago. As the process was coming to a close, she told me that a neighbor behind the house has three rottweilers.
We both groaned about it and she said she wasn’t going to worry since there is a fence between the two yards. Well, that was the goal.
As I said. A few weeks ago, there was an incident- a serious one.
My nieces are 8 and 9, and petite as all get out; tiny, beautiful girls.
My sister was waiting for the girls to get home after school one day when the 8 year old burst into the house in hysterics; sister…dogs… Backyard.
I know that what my sister experienced in that moment was sheer terror as she raced out to find her baby girl surrounded by the three massive dogs, sobbing and peeing on herself, scared to death.
The dogs were mapping out their attack, and they were going to shred that little girl into pieces.
Thankfully, my sister got the girls safely in the house.
And then MY phone rang.
It was my sister. She was already in the car, on her way around the block to confront the neighbors.
She was calm…scary calm. She explained that when the 8 year old first came in the house and said her sister was in the yard with the dogs, she pictured her daughter dead behind the house.
Long story short, I told her to NOT confront the neighbors; go home, call 911, call your husband.
In the end, animal control came and took a report and talked to my sister and her husband about their rights and the process for dealing with dogs that are likely a threat. It’s been about 3 weeks now and my sister has seen the dogs less than a handful of times since.
But that night and in the days after, in the midst of our many discussions about “the dogs” my sister wanted to know what would happen if she’d have shot the dogs. She’s a law abiding gun owner, as is her husband.
It was very evident that the dogs jumped the fence because they saw the girls- they weren’t already in the yard, the didn’t jump in after the girls had been home; they saw the girls and jumped into the yard, quickly surrounding one.
What were they going to do? Attack her- common sense says they were going to attack my niece and shred her to pieces.
Would my sister have been within her legal rights to shoot the dogs? Yes. Things might get sticky if she’d shot them their first escape, having not bitten the children.
I shared the news report of the 3 children being attacked, with my sister, and that set us back into the discussion about violent dogs and how to defend yourself and your children from them.
What do you do when five dogs, who are bigger and weigh more than you and your children combined, are in attack mode? How do you defend yourself? What must it be like to see your childrens’ lives hanging in the balance, and you’re powerless to stop it?
So then of course my sister and I had to think about how you kill a massive dog that has worked itself into a frenzy- multiplied by five.
If you do an internet search on how to defend yourself from an attacking dog, you’ll find some grim news; nothing works, short of weapons. Punching the dog, kicking, biting- none of those things work.
And even better, if your not Usain Bolt, don’t even bother trying to outrun the dog. It will catch you, and make you pay.
I love animals, and grew up with dogs. I couldn’t imagine wanting to own a dog that could attack a person so severely that they were permanently disfigured, or worse, killed. It’s simply a risk I’d never want to take.
All that nonsense about ‘dogs don’t attack unless provoked’, is malarkey. I mean, define “provoked”, really. When my nieces walked into their back yard as they do every day with they come home from school, was that provoking the dogs? Nope.
And while the neighbor has kept the dogs inside since this happened- that’s not a solution to the problem- they can’t keep them in the house forever, and as far as the adults are concerned, the girls are still at risk of being attacked.
What would you do in this scenario?
