Seattle Met article "Consider the Pitbull"

Snippets from a recent article discussing Pitbull legislations in Seattle.

"The attack on Huong Le more than four years ago (September 8, 2008) could have happened yesterday—or the day before that, or tomorrow—argue anti–pit bull activists, because neither King County nor Seattle has comprehensive laws that target the dogs. The mauling helped spark a countywide pit bull debate, the reverberations of which can still be felt today. Weeks after Le was released from Harborview, her family issued a statement to the media, calling for a ban on pit bulls in Washington. In Seattle earlier that year a speech and acting coach named Ellen Taft proposed legislation to the city council that would, if not outright ban the dogs, make it nearly impossible to legally maintain them within city limits. Another woman, Colleen Lynn, a freelance web designer, launched a victims’ advocacy site, inspired in part by an attack she sustained while jogging in Beacon Hill.

Pit bull owners, meanwhile, insist their pets are among the sweetest, safest dogs a person can own, that savage attacks like the one on Huong Le are an anomaly, exceptions rather than the rule. The real enemies, many pit bull supporters insist, are careless owners and, worse, those trying to kill the city’s pit bull party. "

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"Astute pet lovers in the city, however, know better than to underestimate Ellen Taft. Just ask dog owners who used to let their dogs play in the now-nonexistent designated dog area in Volunteer Park; or go ahead and try to find an owner out in public with his pooch off leash—just to name a couple Taft triumphs. “This is Seattle, and most people are followers,” she says, “and they don’t like to be labeled uncool and antidog, so they don’t say it; but I think there’d be a lot of people out there who’d like to see some restrictions on pit bulls.”

Pit bulls, she insists, are a public danger on par with assault weapons. “Because they were specifically bred to fight other dogs, the damage that they inflict is much greater than any other dog.”"

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"Dr. James Ha, an animal behaviorist at the University of Washington who has testified in the courtroom for numerous animal attack cases, agrees with Van Helvoort[pro pit bull and pit bull guardian]. Despite the splashy headlines and even the dog-bite death rates, there is nothing about pit bull–type dogs, as breeds, that makes them any more dangerous than many other dogs, Ha says. “We have to make a big distinction between a genetic breed predisposition, and how the animals are handled or trained. Many years ago German shepherds were the ‘bad’ dogs, because people kept them for protection, and criminals held them for protecting property. Then it was Dobermans, then Rottweilers, now pit bulls. All of these breeds have equally high aggression drives and can be trained, or mistreated, into becoming dangerous animals.” And while it’s true that due to breeding that took place a century ago, the dogs, with their superior neck and upper-body strength, are capable physically of doing deadly damage to humans and other animals, “pit bulls have no different threshold for aggression than those other breeds.”"

Please read the full article here.