Things gone ta de dogs

Dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs! Everywhere you turn in Toronto in the past few days dogs have been part of the conversation.

Why you ask? Well there were two attacks involving pitbulls here last week here.

The first incident involved a pitbull attacking another dog which tried to run away and was hit by a car. This led the owner to spend quite a bit of money in medical expenses on the injured dog. This owner was rather upset and wants the pitbull's owner to pay some of the medical expenses incurred but the pit bull owner says most of the dog's injuries were inflicted by the car so he and his dog are not to blame.

The second and more serious incident involved a guy who was taking care of his neighbour's pitbulls for the weekend. He took them for a walk and they attacked him from behind for no apparent reason. Anyway some persons in the vicinity attempted to pry the dogs off him but to no avail and so the police had to come in and shoot both dogs utilizing a total of 16 bullets to completely stop them.

This has started a whole dialogue on the safety of this particular breed of dog with City and Provincial officials saying they may look into the banning of the breed.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on this matter. Lots of folks think they are dangerous, indeed vicious dogs who should be banned from the province while some including some vets and pet owners believe that most pit bulls are harmless, kind gentle, loyal creatures and that what has happened is that these two occurrences were either anomalies or the result of the owners raising the dogs to be vicious. Regardless of the stance one takes on this issue it seems like everytime I turn on the news there is some dog expert, dog owner or dog walker speaking either for or against the issue.

Well I have no real info on pitbulls to be swayed one way or the other but its still an interesting debate. I never had a pitbull but my family had dogs when I was growing up so I know that some dogs are just mean and some dogs are gentle. Its just like people everyone is different.

Now my question is if the decision is made to ban the dogs how does one determine that the dog is a pitbull? I mean it may or it may not be quite obvious with the pure breed ones but are we also going to include dogs with 1/2 pitbull, 1/8 pitbull, 1/16 pitbull? Do dog owners have to go pull out a record to prove that their dog is not a pitbull and has no pitbull ancestry up to 4 generations back? Will pit bulls be forced to try to "pass" as other breeds to avoid the ban just like how light skinned blacks would try to "pass" as white folk back in the old days to get out of the discrimination against them?

I can just imagine some fellow with a dog that's clearly a pit bull from head to toe but he's trying to pass it off telling people its not really a pit bull, "it may look like a pit bull but is really just a big boned poodle."