Below is how to answer fear mongering anti pit bulls pro BSL letters/opinions published in newspapers… Last week, the Orlando Sentinel published a couple of opinion pieces by noted and discredited pit bull hater Colleen Lynn… all about how safe Orlando will be when pit bulls are banned.
I wrote a letter to Mike Lafferty the Opinion editor and asked if Colleen Lynn should be banned from speaking about pit bulls and suggested that they pick more credible writers and also counter with differing opinions (which to his credit, they did, he informed me).
Here is how the pit bull community responded:
“We all want to live safely, including with dogs. With that purpose in mind, we should adopt policies that have succeeded, and avoid ones that failed.
Breed-specific regulation did not originate with pit bulls. Long Branch, N.J., banned the Spitz in 1878. Massachusetts banned bloodhounds in 1886. Australia prohibited the further importation of German Shepherd dogs in 1929.
None of these breed-specific regulations made communities safer, and all have long since been consigned to the dustbin reserved for government failures.”
“…This is how dog attacks happen. A dog is causing problems in a neighborhood, the owners are not responsive, people try to get somebody to do something and the people who are supposed to be addressing these issues (animal control or the police) don’t respond because there is no injured party and the threat to public safety isn’t abundantly obvious until the dog has either hurt someone or is threatening to do so right before the officer’s eyes.
“Today, the Sentinel ran an editorial from noted pit bull hater Colleen Lynn, who runs an organization called DogsBite.org., called “Banning pit bulls saves lives and protects the innocent.” She claims that pit bull bans will help keep communities safer because, in theory, the dogs that she thinks are doing all the biting won’t be around anymore. She cherry-picks a bunch of dubious statistics (for instance, she cites a dated CDC study that looked at dog breeds responsible for dog bites over a period of years that the CDC itself has said really didn’t prove much of anything; they’ve since stopped using breed as a way of categorizing dog bites because they say their findings weren’t really conclusive enough to draw conclusions) and some sensational information (for instance, she says pit bulls don’t let go of what they’re biting until they’re dead – which is why people sometimes say they are “dead game.” That’s a whole lot of malarkey, but also beside my point for now) and concludes that a pit bull ban would keep people from being mauled by dogs.”
