The New Normal

In the short time since SRUV first addressed the NH SPCA earlier this week, more incidents involving these dogs have come to our attention. 

NH SPCA

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SRUV recently addressed a series of posts to the New Hampshire SPCA. The subject was the adopting out of fighting breeds. As part of the series SRUV  listed a number of dog attacks, all committed by recently adopted pit bulls which had been placed in family homes by animal shelters and humane societies.

The current news is once again filled with accounts of attacks by rescued pit bulls.

One of the more trenchant accounts is of the attack and fatal mauling of a 10-year old Yorkshire Terrier named Zoar. Zoar's human companions, Alda and Rikk Crill of Longmont Colorado, were walking their two Yorkies when a large pit bull charged and ripped Zoar's chest open.

Animal control ticketed the owner of the pit bull, Courtney Ebert-Hein,  on "suspicion of failure to control an animal and possession of an aggressive animal."  The pit bull "happily greeted animal control officers while still covered in Zoar's blood," and was returned to the safety and comfort of his home. Ebert-Hein, the mother of two children, said her family plans to keep the pit bull. She would like to apologize to the Crills.

We're sorry Courtney, but in this case saying you're sorry would not suffice.

The pit bull had been adopted from the Longmont Humane Society three months ago.  Current news also carries accounts of attacks by recently adopted pit bulls in Gainesville, Florida and Elgin, Illinois.

Liz Smokowski, the executive director of the LHS, said that the pit bull's record shows that she had a good record of playing with other dogs. Ebert-Hein, on the other hand, told officers that she had been warned that the dog had been involved in a fight at the shelter.

Smokowski also claimed that humane society staff counseled the new owners that the pit bull must remain on a leash. "It is important that you take precautions," she said. "This is why there are leash laws in effect."

Leash laws? Do these people realize what they sound like when they say stuff like this? Has she been living in a cave? All Ms Smokowski would have to do is browse the internet for five minutes to learn how frequently pit bulls break restraints, crash through windows, invade homes, and break through fences, so they can pursue an attack. She can, in fact, read numerous stories to this effect here on the pages of SRUV.

This is not the first time that LHS has been in the news. Last year, following a pit bull attack in a nearby town, it was the the LHS director of behavior and training, Aimee Sadler, who cautioned readers that the attack "doesn't mean that people should be wary of all pit bulls."

On the very same day the Longmont attack was in the news, a pit bull entered a yard and killed a cat in Deltona Florida. The animal control officer who responded to the scene there "found both owners at fault because both animals were unrestrained."  The victim was a cat in its own front yard.

Is this the new normal?

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News Source: Pit Bull attacks 10-year old Yorkie; Longmont Times-Call
News Source: Pit bull enters yard, kills cat, Daytona Beach News Journal

Related post: NH SPCA

See Also: Today's pit bull attacks in the US

NH SPCA: III

Pit bulls which are adopted out to families by SPCAs and shelters continue to make the news. In the short time since SRUV first addressed the NH SPCA earlier this week, more incidents involving these dogs have come to our attention. We've listed several below.

An 18-year old Elizabeth woman was bitten more than 20 times today by her dog, which then turned on a police officer who shot and killed it. . . . . The woman was first attacked by the dog, a pit bull rescue, inside her home.

The Star-Ledger, New Jersey

A 6-year-old Rochester Hills girl was hospitalized Saturday night after a pit bull bit her in the face and thigh. The homeowner told sheriff's deputies the pit bull is a rescue dog.
Rochester Hills Patch

And from a news story posted on April 5th:

Three year old Ryland Moody was in critical condition after undergoing surgery at Arkansas Children's Hospital, a spokeswoman said. The child was attacked by a pit bull his mother adopted less than a month ago, and is being treated for severe trauma to the face and head.
Arkansas News

Finally, also on April 5th:

I saw the dog throw the kid around, one neighbor said. It was clamped so tight on him you couldn’t get him free. If we hadn't managed to finally free him the dog could have grabbed his neck and he would have been done for. The pit bull was adopted from the Humane League of Lancaster County in February.
WHPTV.com, CBS21

What the headlines fail to tell us is the extent of the injuries in these attacks. An attack to a child's face is nearly always a disfiguring attack, with long term economic and human costs. Amaya Hess, who suffered a facial disfigurement attack as an infant in 2006, recently endured her 57th reconstructive surgery.

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News:
NH woman, dog, recover from pit bull attack
Girl attacked by pit bull to have 57th surgery

NH SPCA pit bull promotions:
Film showing follows pit bull attacks in N.H. (March 30)
Beware of pit bull bias, handlers say (March 4)

See Also: Today's pit bull attacks in the US

MSPCA: III

According to the National Canine Research Council,

pit bulls are no more likely to show inappropriate

aggressive behavior than are golden retrievers.

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Note: After publishing this post we discovered additional sources referring to the aggressive tendencies of Golden Retrievers in relation to pit bulls. We have subsequently published nearly twenty posts about the Hannover Formula, which are indexed here. While the post below may be incomplete, the details and substance of the post are accurate.

Oct 1, 2012; 21:08 GMT

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SRUV first discovered this claim in a news item carried on WCVB, Boston's ABC television channel. The claim also appeared on the station's internet page.

The TV coverage which first carried the claim was prompted by the annual Pit Bull Awareness Month national campaign. The WCBV spot may have been prompted by outreach from Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) Advocacy Director Kara Holmquist, who is interviewed in the segment.

SRUV first checked the MSPCA web site, where we were unable to find any mention of the golden retriever claim.

Next, SRUV used Google advanced search and framed the entire sentence (as it appears at the top of the page) within quotation marks as the search query. Google returned only four instances of the sentence on the web, none of them from the National Canine Research Council (NCRC), the purported source of the information. The first hit pointed to the WCBV television newscast which originally drew our attention.

The second and third hits (as shown in the screen grab below) are parked domains on GoDaddy.com, now serving as advertising platforms. All four hits displayed the entire sentence in bold type.

The final hit pointed to Trill, an articulate inner-city blogger who recounts a pit bull attack. Trill's post is dated June 13, 2010. The NCRC golden retriever claim appears on Trill's blog in the form of a comment posted by Yana. Yana's comment is copied in it's entirety here:

Yana said...
According to the National Canine Research council, pit bulls are no more likely to show inappropriate aggressive behavior than are golden retrievers.
:)
October 15, 2011 9:28 PM 

Yana's comment appeared 2 days after the TV segment which first aired Ms Holmquist's golden retriever claim (a full year and a half after Trill's original post), just after the beginning of the MSPCA Pit Bull Awareness month.

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Finally, we checked the purported source of the claim, the NCRC web site. Once again SRUV searched for the entire golden retriever claim. We were directed to two pages within the web site, which are the apparent source for the unsubstantiated claim.

The two pages are similar in many respects; the first is the search results page, and is shown in the screen grab here: 

When the Continue reading link is followed we arrive at a similar page which gives a synopsis of a Spanish study.  A careful reading reveals that NCRC has misrepresented the Spanish study, which was originally published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior (JVB).  According to the JVB (the page can be viewed here), the authors of the Spanish study looked for owner-perceived behavioral problems in the dog population, which in effect measures owners' behavior rather than their dogs' behavior. The NCRC interpretation of the Spanish study is highly suspect, if not laughable.

Furthermore, neither of the two pages on the NCRC web page mention golden retrievers. The direct comparison of pit bulls to golden retrievers doesn't exist, either on the NCRC web page or on the MSPCA web page, and must be considered deceptive. The sentence may exist in other, internal documents, or in someone's imagination. Perhaps the sentence was an elaboration on the part of MSPCA. Or an outright fabrication.

The American public is predisposed to believe our humane organizations and SPCA's. Unfortunately, the unsubstantiated claim discussed in this post has been promulgated by MSPCA as factual. This careless, unprofessional behavior represents a clear breach of trust. We must now question whether the MSPCA has lost their way, and thus no longer has the public interest at heart.  

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Related posts: MSPCA I; MSPCA II; The Triumvirate, Glossary

Today's pit bull attacks on Google news -- Click here!

Ledy VanKavage, Jane Berkey, Karen Delise, Kara Holmquist, BSL ineffective, Golden Retrievers

MSPCA: II

The trigger for the attack may have been a “territorial” response.

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Normanda Torres was standing in the kitchen of her family's home on Brian Road in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, when she was attacked by Rex, the family's pit bull.

Normanda was taken to Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, where she remains in critical condition after several days. If she survives, she will undergo surgery for facial reconstruction. Rex was taken to the New England Animal Medical Center (NEAMC), where he was euthanized so tissue from Normanda's face could be removed from his stomach. Had the family not given permission for Rex to be euthanized, he could have been quarantined for ten days and then returned to the family.

According to Lou Berman, a hospital administrator for NEAMC, attacks by pit bulls in which human body parts are consumed by the attacking dog are extremely rare. While Mr Berman may be unaware of attacks of this intensity, they are not at all uncommon. Disfiguring and fatal pit bull attacks on humans are now occurring at the rate of two every three days.* There have been at least 16 human deaths attributed to pit bulls in the current year (Fatal Pit Bull Attacks), and numerous additional attacks which have left the victims permanently disfigured, often with the loss of tissue.

After each pit bull attack there follows a period of trying to understand the cause of the attack;  unprovoked attacks by our animal companions in our own homes are unexpected. Yet there are the inevitable, awkward attempts by pit bull advocates to explain the attack, or to deflect the public's attention from news of the attack.

According to Eric Badger, who serves as Bridgewater's animal control officer, the attack may have been triggered by a "territorial" response on the part of the pit bull. As SRUV has previously noted, the "territorial" explanation offered by Mr Badger is widely employed by pit bull advocates when there is no apparent cause for an unprovoked attack.

At the risk of explaining the obvious, SRUV will note that very few family pets respond to perceived "territorial" threats with unprovoked disfiguring attacks. Such an attack is an inherent risk of pit bull ownership.

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In October the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) launched their annual "Pit Bull Awareness" campaign; this took place within weeks after two children were killed by pit bulls in separate attacks. This annual campaign amounts to a month-long blizzard of pit bull advocacy, with the goal of placing more surplus pit bulls in family homes.

With increasing numbers of pit bulls being placed in family homes by rescues, shelters, and humane societies, the number of pit bull attacks on family members by shelter dogs has climbed to unprecedented numbers. Thirty-two people have suffered disfiguring or fatal attacks by shelter or rescue dogs since 2007, the vast majority of which were pit bulls.*  As these numbers climb, the cost of liability payouts to victims has reached millions of dollars. If Rex was adopted out by a rescue or shelter, that shelter may bear liability for this attack. In addition, the cost of insurance premiums for the shelters balloons. There are other hidden costs of these pit bull attacks, including the immeasurable human cost.

In a recent post SRUV called on MSPCA to cease placing pit bulls in family homes, and to cease all media and legislative advocacy for pit bulls. SRUV suggested that the resources be used instead for legitimate humane causes. Furthermore, SRUV calls upon the MSPCA and other humane agencies to establish funds for the human and animal victims of pit bull attacks. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, but we hope that the news of attacks like the attack on Normanda, which will occur again today or tomorrow, will encourage the MSPCA to finally act.

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Related posts: MSPCA, Rapid Response
News source: Woman mauled by pit bull  (Enterprise News)
                      and other sources
Today's pit bull attacks on Google news -- Click here!

* Statistical and other information included in this post is from
   More Adoptions Will Not End Shelter Killing of Pit Bulls,
   the editorial feature of Animal People, October 2011, pg 3.


Bridgewater MA pit bull attack; New England Animal Medical Center, NEAMC, facial disfigurement