Do Criminals Seek Out Vicious Dogs?
I appreciate the basis for this research — that there is a connection between human criminal behavior and having dogs that are listed as “vicious” — but someone needs to factor into all this that its not that the dogs are vicious to start with or become vicious because they want to be like their bad owners: owners like these LOOK for dogs that they can abuse enough to MAKE dangerous. These scumbags want the biggest dogs they can find to make themselves feel like “real” men (though I do know there are some women involved in this hideous activity as well).
No offense to Beagles (I have one in my pack) but let’s get real here. How “manly” does some thug look with a beagle? Now my Beatrice can be pretty fierce when she wants to be but that’s not what this is about. This “vicious” thing is about perception and these thugs want to have dogs that make them look bigger and badder. A Rottie or a Pittie can be a very sweet dog but both breeds LOOK “bad.”
So let’s get this straight please. The breeds aren’t bad. The humans are bad and they are the ones who need to be penalized!
This article comes from Reuters and Yahoo News.
People with vicious dogs may be vicious too
People who own vicious dogs such as pit bulls have significantly more criminal convictions — including crimes against children — than owners of licensed, gentler dogs such as beagles, researchers reported on Thursday.
A study of 355 dog owners in Ohio showed that every owner of a high-risk breed known for aggression had at least one brush with the law, from traffic citations to serious criminal convictions.
And 30 percent of people who owned an aggressive breed of dog and who also had been cited at least once for failure to register it had at least five criminal convictions or traffic citations.
This compared to 1 percent of owners of low-risk, licensed dogs such as poodles, beagles or collies, the researchers reported in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
“Owners of vicious dogs who have been cited for failing to register a dog (or) failing to keep a dog confined on the premises … are more than nine times more likely to have been convicted for a crime involving children, three times more likely to have been convicted of domestic violence … and nearly eight times more likely to be charged with drug (crimes) than owners of low-risk licensed dogs,” said Jaclyn Barnes of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
Barnes and colleagues used public records to check on the criminal pasts of dog owners.
They used agreed definitions of vicious dogs used in writing local ordinances. “A ‘vicious dog” means a dog that, without provocation, has killed or caused serious injury to any person, has killed another dog, or belongs to a breed that is commonly known as a pit bull dog,” they wrote in their report.
The definition excludes dogs used in law enforcement or dogs protecting an owner or property.
Aggressive breeds identified by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and some insurance companies include pit bulls, rottweilers, akitas and chows.
The most frequent low-risk breeds seen in the study included terriers, beagles, collies and poodles.
