April 04, 2013
Pekingese
Banning specific breeds has clearly not worked. There are also plenty of breeds that are not counted as dangerous but have the natural bulk and dentistry so that any sufficiently cruel or stupid owner can turn them into a lethal weapon. You can see the evidence of this walking around the down-at-heel green spaces of Britain where criminally aspirant teenagers take their “status dogs” for training sessions in which they excite them to the point of attacking a stick or a piece of rope, then wrestle with them to condition the dog physically and mentally not to let go.
Rather than enacting new laws, I would simply advise police to approach anyone with a dog in this frenzied state and demand that the dog be handed over since it was clearly out of control and thus a public nuisance. If the dog then attacks the police officer, it can be confiscated and either be retrained and rehoused or killed.
If we need to ban anything, it is my neighbor’s Pomeranian and all breeds that come under the umbrella term “toy dog.” But we should ban them for reasons other than danger to humans.
Around 15,000 years ago when man first began to domesticate Europe and Asia’s wolves”from which all modern dogs descend”there was a tacit but clear contract between us. Along with his liberty and independence, the wolf gave up life’s struggles in a state of nature. He was given his share of the hunter-gatherer’s meal and a place by the fireside. In return, man received a loyal companion whose better senses alerted him to the nighttime raids of predators and rival human groups, whose greater speed and stamina could pursue wounded prey far beyond our own capabilities, and whose faster reproductive cycle and maturation rate meant he could be more quickly replaced should he be killed at the end of the hunt.
What the wolf didn”t sign up for was being bred down into a barking bauble that could be kept in a handbag, prey to a dozen hereditary diseases caused by inbreeding, and in many cases physical deformities so monstrous that such creatures cannot be birthed any other way than by Caesarean section.
The ancient contract between man and wolf has been breached. What greater sin against nature can there be than an animal that dreams of hunting bison in snowy wastes but wakes in the body of a Pekingese?
