So, I have this idea. I want a woo-woo creepy artsy thing to put in my room with my other woo-woo creepy artsy stuff. I want to take a picture of me looking sufficiently creepy and some moon and stars and sun and I don’t really know what all else and decoupage it onto a board and sand everything down a little so that it looks sufficiently worn and stain it all a kind of antique brown.
And then, of course, hang it in my room.
Advice?
If your dog bites a police officer, chances are that your dog is going to get shot. That’s unfortunate, but that’s a fact of life. If you don’t want your dog to get shot by the police or you want to have a credible way to dispute the police officer’s account of what happened, keep your dogs in the house where you can control them and witness the police’s behavior.
Knoxviews has a post this morning about a Knoxville police officer who shot a pitbull that bit him. It just got me thinking that you could almost make a checklist for these kinds of incidents.
1. “Pitbull” as a term used very loosely to mean “scary dog of terrier extraction.”
2. Intact male.
3. Dog unsupervised outside.
4. Dog chained up unsupervised outside.
5. Inadequate shelter for dog.
6. Owners of dog insists dog is friendly and no one has reason to be afraid of dog and yet owner seems to have taken great lengths to ensure dog
a.) appears scary
b.) absolutely cannot get off chain
7. Owners involved, even tangentially, in illegal activities.
Shall we check this incident against the list?
1. Eighty-five pounds? Short legs? Thick fur on his chest and upper body? Didn’t we just used to call those junkyard dogs? Please, this is a pit bull in the sense of it being a large dog of terrier extraction.
2. That appears to be a testicle peaking out in the picture of Kobe.
3. Yep
4. Check
5. Plastic hut does not cut it. Other than keeping the rain off them, what does that do?
6. Look at the size of that chain. Kobe was supposed to be a scary dog. Is anyone surprised when he acted like a scary dog?
7. Appears so.
I only have one quibble with CBT over at Knoxviews. S/he* says “I sometimes feel sorry for responsible pit bull breeders and owners who treat their dogs with proper care. These dogs are more aggressive by nature, but so are other breeds.”
Sing along with me, folks, “Pit bull is not just a breed, it’s a type, and a job description.” “Pit bulls” when you look at the number of bites and attacks they’re responsible for and then consider how many breeds of dogs (and mutts) which get called pitbulls and average them out, they’re not biting or attacking more people than other dogs their size with similar temperaments.
It’s like this. Say you were tracking girl bites. You noticed that Susans bit 6 men a year on average. LaTonyas bit 5. Marias bit 10. Jennifers bit 15. And Phillipses bit 60.
Well, damn, it would look like us Phillips women were problem biters. But, if you consider that there are twenty different women all considered Phillipses, the numbers start to look different. Bs might bite 10 folks a year. As might bite 12. Cs might bite one. Ds might bite 20. In other words, if you counted us the same as you’re counting everyone else, you’d find our behavior is very similar.
But because we’re convinced that it’s the Phillipses who are the problem, we count them in a way that reconfirms their problem status.
I believe it was Say Uncle that pointed this out–I’m going to give him credit for it any way–more than breed, more than training, more than upbringing, the one overarching consistancy in dog attacks is the dogs are usually unneutered males.
That’s a problem that’s easy enough to solve.
Fix your dogs, folks.
*Yes, I did use that formation just to annoy you.
Via Egalia:
Less than two hours after the story hit the press, “two Des Moines men applied at the Polk County recorder’s office for a marriage license, and for the first time the application was accepted.” (It takes 3 days to get the license.)
The dog has a collar that looks like this:
If you open it from one end, it closes again very easily. If you open it from the other end, it is a bitch to get closed.
The Redheaded Kid is notorious for opening and closing the wrong end of the collar.
Fine, you’d have to be a really ungrateful bitch to complain about how your friends take your dog out, especially friends who have shown such a willingness to dogsit in the past.
But folks, check this out:
I know it’s blurry, but you have to appreciate that it’s hard for me to focus when my fingernail has just been half torn off way down in the pink.
The whole thing needs to come off, there’s no two ways about it, because it’s just going to continue to get snagged on things and hurt even worse, but, though you can’t see it, the crack is like a sideways Y with the prongs being to our right. If I pull it off, I don’t know how I can guarantee that the nail will continue to break along the top prong, which would be very unpleasant, but at least appear to be going to the other side of the nail, or if it would take the bottom prong, which is headed deeper in.
Most of all, I wish I had cut my nails yesterday when I was thinking about it.
Tiny Cat Pants 