This is so unfair and so cruel, I think I might burst into tears.

Telegraph - Foxes can safely sleep: babies can’t. By Andrew O’Hagan

Historians some day might be astonished to discover the number of man-hours that went into protecting countryside vermin from dogs and humans, while an average of 3,000 people are injured every year by dangerous mutts with irresponsible owners.

After the killing of Cadey-Lee Deacon the other day – snatched from her bed by two Rottweilers and mauled to death on the roof of a pub – it might be intelligent to look again at the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act, which was always too perfunctory in its details.

That Act came into being because of the wildly increased number of maulings by English pit bull terriers, and it became an offence to be the owner of a dog that is out of control in a public place. But the breadth of that stricture misses the point: many of these dogs are bred (and adored) on account of their viciousness, and a great number of the people who have them as pets see them as being a symbol of both personal security and incipient rage.

I’m against those dogs. Just as I don’t understand why anyone in civilian life would have use for an automatic assault weapon, I don’t see why anyone should be encouraged to squire a dangerous dog around the streets.

In America, the right to own such a weapon is taken to be a matter of civil liberties, and some will say the same of those dogs: you can’t stop people having them or training them, and can only insist that some of them wear muzzles.

Vicious dogs — pit bulls, Dobermans, Canary Island dogs — they’re vicious as a result of animal abuse. He said himself the dogs “are bred (and adored) on account of their viciousness, and a great number of the people who have them as pets see them as being a symbol of both personal security and incipient rage,” and to get them to fill that symbolic role they will purposefully beat the dog, starve it, keep it in cages, feed it gunpowder to make it “mean”, all so when they’re out on the street their poor animal look sufficiently terrifying in front of their a-hole friends. But by all means, rather than punishing the owners for animal abuse, let’s ban the animal because they’re “naturally vicious” and let the bastards doing this to them trade in illegal dogs just like they’re trading in illegal guns and knives and drugs and everything else that’s been banned in that stupid country in the past forty years because god forbid we should have to actually put anyone in jail.

Date: Sep 27th, 2006 · Comments RSS · Tags: Science and Nature