Whilst Britain is not a country where many people own or have access to firearms, such as is the case in Switzerland or the USA, that doesn’t mean that Britons don’t have access to other weapons or dangerous things. In Britain the dangerous items that appear to do the most damage, on a day to day basis are knives and increasingly aggressive dogs. Britain I’m afraid does have a four legged weapon problem.
Not a week seems to go by without the excellent Ambush Predator blog covering a story about dangerous dogs and their stupid owners. Now another story, this time via Sky News, has emerged over the weekend about another terrible dog attack incident.
According to Sky News there was an attack by a dog on its owner and a child in a house in Nottingham. The dog, an American Bulldog, not a banned breed like a Pitbull, attacked a child in the house then turned on its owner. Another occupant of the house managed to stab the dog with a kitchen knife to try to stop the attack and get the dog into the back garden and away from its victims. The dog was later euthanised by a vet but the adult victim of the dog attack is said to have suffered ‘life changing injuries’ which is normally British media code for injuries that going to have a significant impact on the life of the person who has been injured.
Aggressive dogs and the people who want to keep them either as weapons or as status symbols are a constant problem in the United Kingdom. Some men and occasionally some women who want to intimidate others or to be seen as more powerful than they really are, often own dogs like American Bulldogs, Staffies and similar canines. They swagger round with them and bask in the knowledge that at the end of the lead the dog is on, if they are even on a lead that is, there is a potentially lethal weapon. Such people are little different from those wannabe gangsters who pose with firearms on social media in so far as they want the world to know how ‘hard’ they are. Sadly these sort of people and their deadly sentient weapons normally only come to light when their dogs attack others or as in this case, attack their owners.
Unlike nations such as the USA and Switzerland where gun ownership and access is widespread and most people own and use firearms responsibly, Britain’s four legged weapons are not responsibly owned or used. Too often these dogs are treated in a similar nonchalant way as an idiot would treat a loaded firearm and just as an idiot would kill either themselves or someone else by poor firearm handling, so the owners of these dogs contribute to the deaths and injuries to hundreds of people and animals by their ownership and often lackadaisical training of dangerous dogs. Too many of the owners of these sort of dogs do nothing to reduce or control the inherent aggression of these dogs, on the contrary, they want the aggression as it bolsters, as they see it, in order to bolster their own image.
I am struggling to understand what could motivate the victim of this latest attack to want to own, be in close proximity to or have children around a type of dog that could go apeshit at any random minute. The more I think about this and similar cases, the more I wonder whether the motivations to have such a dog were not good ones.
Legislation surrounding aggressive dogs is, please excuse the pun, a bit of a dog’s dinner. The main legislation The Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, does have provisions for the control of any aggressive dog, mostly controls problematic dog’s by way of deciding which breeds should be banned. Whilst this has probably reduced the number of Pitbulls that are on our streets, those who want such dangerous dogs have merely switched to other dangerous breeds but not ones listed in the Act. The Government is constantly playing Whack A Mole with dangerous dogs. When Pitbulls were banned the scum element of society chose other breeds that they could pose with such as Staffies and American Bulldogs. There needs to be a better way of controlling dangerous dogs than that provided by the Dangerous Dogs Act. One way to do this would be to make all dog owners, no matter what the breed of dog, register their dogs annually and have them microchipped. In effect we should bring back the Dog Licence. The police should also be proactive in any future dog registration and control scheme. People who own dogs should expect to be inspected by the police if they let their Dog Licence lapse. Personally I think that this would be a much better use of police resources than having officers attending worthless ‘diversity’ courses or siting on Twitter mining for ‘offence’. Society needs to put the wind up aggressive dog owners and even without new legislation this can be done. The Dangerous Dogs Act has the provision that those who are in control of dogs that kill someone should get a maximum of 14 years in gaol and those who have dogs that injure people should get a maximum of five years. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a case where those who own dogs that kill or injure have got anything like this sort of exemplary sentence. Too often the cases are like this one where a man got 18 months for owning a dog that killed a child. Sentences like these are woefully lenient and will do nothing to curb the ownership of dogs that are little different in the degree of danger that they pose, from an idiot owning and fooling around with a loaded firearm.
As long as nothing is done about dangerous and aggressive dogs, Britain will continue to experience deaths and disablement from the enormous number of four legged weapons that are in the hands of Britons. This is an ongoing tragedy that nobody in authority really seems to want to do anything about. Maybe it’s time that this situation changed?
