Blimey, Another One....

[frufru]

You were lucky staffyluv - my grandparents lived at Broken Head and I remember having to climb trees several times to get away from Afghans who were not being friendly

[Maddy]

I disagree. I think the details do matter. If it's being described with words like vicious and ferocious and no one could stop an attack like that for more than five minutes, yet there is barely a mark on the victim, it makes me wonder what else is incorrect about the report? It makes me wonder if it was actually an attack or more closely related to dogs rushing and someone falling in the process and panicking. No, it is not acceptable for those dogs to have not been under effective control and to have rushed anyone or caused any kind of injuries, but the outcome for those dogs could be drastically different depending on whether it's treated as a ferocious and vicious attack or rushing. The owners of the staffies need to be penalised regardless but do the dogs need to be euthanised for what they did? If it was an attack I wouldn't hesitate to say yes as we don't need dogs like that in our society. I think it's also important to note that while the dogs were belted with the branch to get them to retreat it was also reported that no one could get close enough to the dogs to try and stop them because they were "too big", so I also question what attempts were made to stop them prior to them being hit? Just because a lot of force was used to stop them, it doesn't mean a lot of force was necessary if no one tried anything else first and they weren't in a frenzied attack. I'm also not saying that it was wrong to hit them to get them to back off, just that looking at everything that has been reported on the news and the injuries, the method used shouldn't necessarily be used to assume that nothing less than extreme measures would have worked.

I have to admit, I was wondering about that myself. Last year, after an especially nasty seizure, the GooberDog latched onto my leg. In the 30 seconds it took me to get a gate between him and myself, this was one of the bites..

Also worth mentioning that I was wearing jeans at the time (which is why it left mostly bruises rather than punctures) and that the Goober is not exactly known for his bite force- it takes him 20 minutes to chew a chicken neck enough to swallow. If a staffy had a full five minutes to really go at someone.. I guess I'd expect to see some damage, besides what looks to be a bruise from her falling over.