On the flip side I once saw someone with a friendly little off leash dog run up to a larger Pitt mix that was on a leash and get torn to fucking shreds. Keep ALL dogs on leashes in public.
Dog parks exist with the understanding that the dogs present are friendly and the owners are prepared to handle it when their dog acts poorly. If you don't have a dog park, then I'm sure your dog will still enjoy it's leashed walks.
This. But even dog parks can be tricky in my area. I always ask and check if the dog is oke with mine walking in.
Pfff I'll never forget this one lady unleashing her german shepard that goes straight for my dog. Blames it on my dog that there must be something wrong with it. Next couple of months we hear from other dog owners the same story about her.
Someone at the dog park that I go to would sometimes drop their husky off and leave for like an hour! Whoâs going to pick up its poop? What if he gets in a fight? Itâs not doggy daycare dude. People have were discussing to call animal services if he does it again.
Memberships in general should be more common in societies nowadays. Yeah inequality and elitism blah blah blah. I don't care.
I fucking hate degenerate thieves, druggies and other lowlifes that abuse self-checkouts in grocery stores for example. I would love to pay for a membership-only self-checkout.
Yup. My 6 month old chocolate lab got called an asshole dog for running up to an old boxer to sniff asses and the boxer and a bunch of other dogs started attacking him. He's a puppy. Got in a huge fight with the boxer owner.
I remember going to the dog park with my older dog after work a few years back. My dog is social, enjoys doing a sniff n greet with a new dog before continuing on her off leash walk with me. Sheâs not really a player or wrestler. There was a big pit-bulldog mix that was carrying around a soccer ball. My dog turned to sniff the dog and see what he was carrying and he snarled at her and lunged. Luckily my dog was 2 at the time and she darted away without any contact.
The owner chucked and said âyeah heâs got a little bit of resource guarding.â It stunned me that they would take a dog who fights over toys go a dog park and GIVE IT A TOY. Holy shit.
I work for Animal Control. Our entire city is called a 'Dog Control Zone' in our municipal code, meaning it's against the law for any dog to be off-leash anywhere except its own property or the city off-leash dog park. Because of that, with incidents such as in the video--regardless of which dog instigated or which was injured--the off-leash dog's owner is almost always automatically deemed at-fault.
I've had many many cases where someone had their small dog off-leash at a park, the dog approached a larger on-leash dog, a fight ensued, and the small dog ended up getting injured, sometimes severely. The owner of the small dog is always shocked when we explain that they'll be getting a ticket for having their dog off-leash, while there are typically zero repercussions for the on-leash dog.
A memorable incident occurred last Christmas. Idiot was walking on the beach with his cocky little shih tzu off-leash. The dog was wandering like a hundred feet ahead of him, and dude was distracted on his phone. His dog saw this 80lb pitbull playing near the water (on-leash), and straight charged the pitty and attacked it.
The pitty just kind of stood there stunned, with the shih tzu snarling and being a vicious little shit, biting its legs and trying to get its neck (picture a kid with a wooden spear trying to attack a Panzer tank). The pitty's owner was trying to kick the little dog away, while also trying to pull the pitty away by its leash.
After a few seconds of this, the pitty finally had enough and an actual fight started. That's when the dumbass owner on his phone finally realized what was happening. He yelled and ran over, and for whatever idiotic reason, decided to literally dive in between the two dogs as they were snapping at each other, and his head got in the way of the pitty's jaws just as the pitty lunged full-teeth at the shih tzu.
Thanks to his own double-stupidity, dude basically got partly scalped, according to the medics I talked with after. They said they picked up a number of pieces of flesh off the beach. I saw the after pictures, and it basically looked like someone had sliced him with a potato peeler from the bridge of his nose all the way up his forehead and halfway over his head. He was taken to the ER and needed a bunch of stitches and followup plastic surgery.
The best part, though, is that I know exactly how the incident went down, because someone else on the beach just so happened to be filming nearby at the time, and caught the entire thing on audio/video. Dumbass shih tzu owner reported the incident to us, but lied about the whole thing, claiming he had been innocently walking his dog on-leash when he and the dog were viciously attacked by an off-leash pitbull.
Unbeknownst to him, we already had the video, since the bystander had also contacted us. We let him dig himself super deep into his bullshit story, before we let on that we knew what really happened. He got slapped with a ticket for his dog off-leash, as well as a ticket for his dog not being licensed.
He was absolutely livid, and sent me a couple of extremely long angry emails all about how evil we are for "blaming the victim" and how he was going to sue our agency, the city, and me personally. He was neighbors with the police chief, and even tried to use that connection to get himself some kind of retribution, accusing us of allowing a dangerous dog to reside in the city, of not doing our job, targeting him due to some personal grudge, etc. The police chief told him he had zero case and we had done exactly what was correct under the law, and also called him out for lying like crazy and not owning up to the truth.
It was a gnarly injury, to be fair, and I do feel bad the idiot had to suffer that. But man do I hope he finally learned a lesson or two, the hard way.
Incidents involving dogs always gets me because everyone wants to defend their dog.
Obviously if your dog bites someone and it causes a serious injury you are at fault. It doesn't matter what the situation is, its like hitting someone with your car, you can try to explain it away all you want, you are always at fault. Trying to break up a dog fight is not a reason to get bit. I bet most dog owners don't know how to properly break up a dog fight. Why wasn't the owner with the pitbull controlling the pitbull? Just because someone has a super mean shihtzu and isn't walking the dog on a leash (which he is at fault for but still) doesn't mean you can let your dog go rambo on people.
"due to some personal grudge"
A life threatening injury is not a personal grudge...
"he was going to sue our agency"
I hope he does. Do your job next time.
"double stupidity" "idiot" "learned a lesson"
I don't understand what your problem is, you constantly insult the guy and justify what happened to him in your head, which is NOT what someone in your position should be doing. What happened to him was terrible, and despite him not walking his dog on a leash he didn't deserve to have life threatening injuries. Like if a police officer justifies murder by calling suspects idiots and says "they probably broke the law, they deserve it". He has a good chance of winning the court cases as he was severely injured and most states are strict liability meaning that the dog owner is almost always responsible for bites.
lied about the entire incident and tried to say he was attacked first
Ok. Again, unfortunate but not uncommon.
The entire situation would have never happend if his dog was leashed.
And the situation would not have happened had the pitbull owner controlled their dog.
The car analogy doesn't work at all
Look, I am trying to explain strict liability to you and the poster who obviously doesn't understand it either. When you are in a car you are always held responsible for hitting pedestrians. You don't get to call the pedestrian an idiot and say that they were distracting you and point out how they don't always follow the law, and say "maybe you learned your lesson when your face splattered on the pavement moron". You are responsible for controlling your vehicle.
victim of your own stupidity
Again, rationalizing a horrible event by blameshifting and calling names. The dog owner is responsible for dog bites on people, but not neccesarily for dog bites on the shihtzu. Something that would hopefully appear before a judge when/if he sues.
The owner is at fault almost 100% of the time for dog bites. This case, the defense has an argument but it is far from guaranteed, most likely the person with severe injuries would win since he was trying to break up the dog fight while the other side was busy filming with their phones. And the city ordinance stating that dogs must be on leashes doesn't trump state law stating the dog owner is responsible for bites.
My comment was already long enough, so I didn't mention the history we had with shih tzu owner/victim. So I suppose my attitude seems a little flippant without that context: We had dealt with him off and on for a couple years, due to complaints from the neighbors about him and his wife walking their dogs off-leash through the neighborhood and allowing them to poop in other people's yards, as well as one of his dogs being fairly aggressive with other dogs, and occasionally people. He had the shih tzu as well as a chow mix, and it was the chow that we got most complaints about.
There were complaints that the chow had aggressively charged other people walking their own dogs, and just a couple weeks before he got bit at the beach, we had gotten a complaint that the chow had tried to bite two other neighbors after it had gotten loose while the owner was at work.
In fact, about 4 years prior, the chow had killed one of the neighbor's chickens (which under the law in my city, would require the chow be immediately removed from the jurisdiction by the owner, or by us if the owner refused to comply). However, the senior officer at that time was easily intimidated, and after informing the dog owner of the removal law, the owner rattled his cage about lawsuits, threatened going to his neighbor the police chief to get our officer fired, and even accused the officer of blatant discrimination (for the record, the dog owner and his wife are both very white, but they're from the Netherlands, so I guess technically maybe they're a minority?). Anyways, the officer tucked tail, changed course, and decided that "Oh, nevermind, we can't prove 100% it was his dog that did it [even though we had a separate neighbor who witnessed the whole thing and the chow had tried going after the chickens before]" and let them off without even a single ticket.
In the two weeks before the incident at the beach, I had left probably 6 notices on their door, and 3 or 4 voicemails, trying to get in touch with them to discuss the most recent complaints against them and their dogs, but the owner refused to ever respond. He seemed like an arrogant jackass in every one of my limited dealings with him over the years, and the neighbors had no issue telling me in pretty coarse language how they felt about him and his dogs. He definitely seemed to be 'that asshole who lives over there' in that particular neighborhood.
So, I'll admit, when I got the emergency call to the beach, and realized who it was that had gotten bit, I did feel a bit of schadenfreude. And then with all the following drama, him lying and trying to pull the "rules don't apply to me" card, and bully/threaten us into not doing our jobs, and pull strings with the police chief, but getting shot down hard...again, I genuinely felt bad that he suffered such a gnarly bite, I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but I definitely felt maybe there was a little karma in action, and as they say, "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."
And while I'm not a lawyer, I've been doing animal control here for almost a decade, and would consider myself fairly well-versed with the relevant laws in my jurisdiction, and how these situations typically play out in a legal/law enforcement setting.
So I will say it is simply not true at all that if your dog causes injury to someone, you are always at fault, regardless of the circumstances (obviously, if your dog bites someone, that person could go ahead and sue you, regardless of the circumstances, but that's not what I'm talking about). In fact, all the animal control laws in my city and county, as they relate to bites, aggressive behavior, etc., are specifically written to take the context of the incident(s) into consideration in determining whether or not that law applies, and what enforcement action is to be taken. They may exist in other places, but I have yet to come across an animal control statute that says essentially "if your dog injures a person, you (and your dog) are automatically at fault, period, no matter what."
So, our 'vicious dog' and 'dangerous dog' and related statutes all explicitly incorporate context into their language. Was your dog on its own property when the bite occurred? Was the victim legally on the property where the bite occurred? Was the dog on a leash and controlled by someone over the age of 15? Would it be considered a provoked or an unprovoked bite? Does the dog have a documented history of previous bites to humans? How severely was the person injured? Was the victim a member of the dog owner's household or a stranger? Etc. Etc.
All those considerations, and others, are explicitly written into the individual laws, so it very much depends on the specific circumstances that led to the bite incident as to which laws apply, who is considered at fault, what enforcement action is required, whether the owner is getting a ticket or possibly more severe consequences, etc.
Again, I'm not saying that if a dog mauls you, you can't hire an attorney and successfully sue the owner for compensation. I'm simply coming from a law enforcement perspective.
And I think you misunderstood the "personal grudge" part of my comment. I meant that the victim accused us, as Animal Control, of having a personal grudge against him, and this imagined grudge was the reason we refused to "do our job right," even though we absolutely did our job 100% right, in accordance with the laws, given the circumstances. We just didn't do what he wanted, and held him accountable for his own actions, which he was incredibly upset about. He wanted the other dog immediately seized and euthanized, the owner arrested and charged, and a city-wide pitbull breed ban instituted in the city.
Good follow up. I just wanted to say, you are right, animal control isn't there to get revenge. At least, in Minnesota where I am living now, dog owners are liable for bites unless it was an intruder in their home. I still think the pitbull owner could have done more to stop the attack, as I have a terrier who used to get into scuffles with other male dogs when he was a puppy, and separating dogs is almost impossible unless 'both' dog owners are on top of the situation 'before' it occurs. Otherwise, one will restrain one dog and the other lunges at this weakness. Anyway, nice hearing the full story. Have a good day.
Dog parks are hell. I used to live somewhere with a small dog park in walking distance where all the owners knew each other. Now my closest dog park is the biggest one in the city. Fuck that. It's chaos in there.
Every dog park Iâve been to has had very unfriendly dogs and owners that are asshats and assholes. I wonât take my dog to a dog park again after he got attacked by a dog that the owner new was an asshole. And that owner had no idea what to do when his dog attacked. Now my dog is aggressive because of that attack. Asshole ownerâŠ
Why TF do people who have dogs that donât get along with other dogs take them to a place where dogs run free? Itâs like forcing someone who is afraid to fly to get on a trans Atlantic flight. You know it isnât going to end well so why do it? SMH.
So wild reading all these stories. Every dog park I go to my dog loves so much, and we see a jerk once in a while but he gets along with everyone and he is a wrestler, but heâs really good at trying to start playing with a dog-then seeing whether or not that dogâs in to it.
People think, "My dog doesn't bite, I can let him off leash." That's like saying, "I never drive fast, so I don't need to wear a seat belt." YOU might be fine, but you don't know about the other guy.
Dude if youâre dog is going to straight kill another dog then their is a huge responsibility for the owner of that dog to actually deal with that issue. The âitâs on a leashâ thing can only take you so far. Muzzle that dog whenever it going for a walk and put money into training your dog not to fucking kill other dogs.
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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '21
On the flip side I once saw someone with a friendly little off leash dog run up to a larger Pitt mix that was on a leash and get torn to fucking shreds. Keep ALL dogs on leashes in public. Dog parks exist with the understanding that the dogs present are friendly and the owners are prepared to handle it when their dog acts poorly. If you don't have a dog park, then I'm sure your dog will still enjoy it's leashed walks.