Full disclosure, I’m nervous around dogs.
Always have been, always will be.
Not the poodles and the cute, tiny ones that my kids are forever pestering me to get. Animals like the American Staffordshire bull terrier that ripped off part of six-year-old Vick Zidko’s scalp in the family home in Doncaster last week.
Beasts like the creature that bit off a 61-year-old grandmother’s finger as she walked her family’s smaller crossbreed in Birmingham last week.
Pets like the pit bull that attacked hairdresser Mahsa Abedi last month, leaving her needing more than 100 stitches on her body.
Also the German shepherd that broke free from its owner and lunged at Paul Jennings and his wife Sasithon last month in Kingston Upon-Thames. He was forced to wrestle it to the ground.
And yet here’s the thing: A petition to hold the Metropolitan Police criminally responsible for shooting two aggressive dogs in London last month has attracted over a million signatures.
The dogs’ deaths prompted widespread condemnation, vigils and a protest outside an East London police station.
Whatever the whys and wherefores of that incident, where is the comparable concern and anger for the human victims? Where are the campaigns for the mums, the dads, the grandmothers and the kids killed or mauled by the animals whose owners would swear blind to you they wouldn’t hurt a fly?
Where are the politicians raising it in parliament and calling for the Dangerous Dogs Act to be toughened up?
How on earth did we get to a place where we are more wound up by the treatment of animals than the killing or mauling of people who could be one of our relatives? Or even us?
Researching this piece, I’ve been struck by the ages of the victims, many of them young kids.
Two-year-old Lawson Bond, savaged at home in Worcestershire last year. Seven year-old Paul Ciardini, set upon in Dorset by a German wirehaired pointer this month. Seventeen-month-old Bella-Rae Birch, mauled to death last year by an American bully XL.
The 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act – which makes it an offence to be the owner of an out-of-control dog in a public or a private place where it is not permitted to be –needs overhauling.
Right now it’s a vague, word salad that doesn’t protect any of us or stop attacks. And we need to re-examine where our priorities lie.
The next person attacked out of nothing could be one of us.
