Another dog attack, this time a 14yo boy

[GreenLumpyTonsils]

In hospital after being mauled by a dog, in Middleton, Sussex

[ruty]

thankfully the owner is going to prison.

[ruty]

but MN does have a lot of threads about attacks/abuse of children from adults?

[Callisto]

Don't see the problem with one thread per news story. It makes life a lot easier than trawling through an amalgmated thread 2,000 post long just to make sure I'm not about to repeat something ten other people have already said.

[wannaBe1974]

agree with fio. And I don't think it' necessarily to do with mn, I think it has to do with the fact that because there has been one horrific attack, the media now feel the need to highlight every incident with a dog to highlight the issue. in fact I've heard more dog stories on the news today than I have for a while - there was
-woman fined because her bulldog jumped on someone

• woman in south wales fined £400 because her dog crapped in her own garden and she would have been fined less if it had crapped in the street

stories which probably wouldn't even have made the news had it not been for the events of the weekend.

[Callisto]

I agree that the media has done the usual frenzy reportage of anti-dog stories, however I do think that dog-attacks on children should all be reported, then people may be a little bit more careful.

[pebblemum]

It does seem that there are more dog attacks happening at the moment but maybe it is because of the media coverage that we are noticing them more.

I heard of a dog biting an 11yr old boy at the weekend, its the 3rd time the dog has attacked someone so it obviously needs to be destroyed but the boys mum wouldnt take him to the hospital for the bite to be checked. She knows the dog is a threat but is putting it before the safety of her children. Luckily the bite wasnt too severe but bad enough to cause the boy a lot of pain, it now appears to be infected but still the mum wont allow it to be sorted. People like her really annoy me, just because she can make a lot of money selling the puppies she is willing to risk people lives by keeping a dog that obviously dangerous

[wannaBe1974]

so should we then also highlight every incident where a child is killed by a car, and every car accident where children are killed? would the amount of children reportedly killed in cars every year make people be more careful with cars? would the amount of children killed, for instance, in accidents involving 4x4's make people think twice about buying them?

[Callisto]

Possibly, possibly not. It is always good to be well-informed and it may make people a bit more careful about fitting car seats correctly etc. It is certainly more important than who is shagging who in the celeb rumour mill.

[FluffyCharlotteCorday]

Actually I think the media reporting a spate of incidents around a certain issue is a standard way of getting a campaign going.

For example, when the campaign to change the way rape victims were treated by the police and the courts was in full swing, the media did a series of articles and programmes about various rape victims who had been treated badly/ rapists who had received suspended sentences. When Stephen Lawrence was murdered, there was a whole spate or articles about how crap the police were at dealing with complaints from ethnic minorities and other examples of crime victims who hadn't been treated properly. Various media stories about children who were abducted and/ or murdered by paedophiles, have led to the introduction of CRB checks, something which was unknown when I was a kid.

I don't see anything wrong with this. The Sun today has called for dangerous dogs to be muzzled in public. You can argue about the details of the campaign (what's a dangerous dog?) but the fact is, you can't run a campaign without individual stories to back it up. And these stories back up the feeling that the presence of dogs in normal streets, in the charge of incompetent idiots, is an undesirable state of affairs which should be tackled.

[FluffyCharlotteCorday]

wannabe - if there were a spate of stories in the media about children being injured or killed by 4x4's, I'm sure we would get questions asked in parliament, and possibly legislation about needing an extra test etc. The momentum for any campaign, is individual news stories.

[edam]

Fluffy's right but there can be a spate of stories without any campaign behind it. When that poor boy was stabbed to death outside his school, stabbing went up the news agenda so there were more stories about stabbings in the nationals than there would have been otherwise. Then another big news story breaks, and stabbings drop down the list.

[FluffyCharlotteCorday]

Agree Edam. Sometimes the media lose interest, the public stop writing outraged letters to the editor in response to a story, it tails off. And then sometimes, it turns into a fully fledged campaign. Sometimes the campaign gets results, though more often it doesn't.

(Does anyone remember the Independent's campaign to make cannabis legal? Are they still running that?)

[FluffyCharlotteCorday]

God I've just seen this awful news story. here

I really hope this woman gets sent to prison for a very very long time. It won't be long enough though. And if enough people get angry about this, and write to their MP's and the newspapers, maybe these awful people will be placed under some kind of control so that they don't have the opportunity to allow their dogs to run amok like this.

[edam]

Agree there has to be a serious sentence here as a warning to other dog owners. I wouldn't say every dog that goes for a child should be put down - if the child has teased the dog, for instance (someone posted here about a vet finding a pencil jammed in a dog's ear as he was putting it down for biting a child). But a dog which escapes into a playground and attacks children is just too dangerous to have around. It should have been put down after the first attack.

[wannaBe1974]

I agree with Edam, if a dog goes for someone in and was unprovoked, then it should be destroyed, but if a dog was provoked, and let's face it toddlers aren't always the gentlest of creatures, then I think that the dog shouldn't necessarily be destroyed. It always amazes me when I hear people say "oh our dog is so lovely with our baby/toddler, he sits on the dog, pulls himself up on its fur, pulls its ears..." ... etc, sorry but imo for a child, even a baby, to be allowed to treat an animal like that is 100% unacceptable and if my child did that to one of my dogs and was then bitten I'd say he deserved it.

now shoot me.

[edam]

I think there's a difference between toddlers being toddlers and older children who should know better teasing dogs, though. Down to the parents/owners to supervise young children to protect both child and dog. If v. young child jams a crayon down the poor dog's ear and the dog snaps, that's the fault of the supervising adult and dog shouldn't be destroyed. Ditto older children deliberately teasing a dog. But an unprovoked attack is different.

[edam]

Mind you, I was just playing rough and tumble with ds and managed to give him a nose bleed (he fell off my back). So much for being a responsible adult!

[Seashells]

I imagine attacks by dogs are indeed very common, the media have suddenly latched onto this and are reporting more than usual. I wonder just how many attacks actually occur, scary!

[wannaBe1974]

I also think that the media pick their battles very carefully, and according to how much support a particular issue is likely to get. If the media started reporting on every 4x4 death for instance, calling for 4x4's to be banned, they simply wouldn't get the kind of support that stories about dog attacks or paedofiles get, not because the issue is any less relevant, but because the brittish public are notoriously attached to their cars, and any bad publicity against them is just seen as yet another attack on the motorist.

[ruty]

it does always seem to be the most stupid and irresponsible people who own these aggressive dogs. Sorry for stereotyping, but it reaaly angers me.

[Callisto]

"sorry but imo for a child, even a baby, to be allowed to treat an animal like that is 100% unacceptable and if my child did that to one of my dogs and was then bitten I'd say he deserved it." I totally agree with you there Wannabee.

I think that there are around 3000 serious dog attacks per year in this country, though may be wrong. I also think that anyone whose dog causes serious injury should face serious penalties and be unable to keep a dog again.

[minx69]

another baby killed by a dog
Seems american Bulldogs are just as dangerous as the rotties of this world.

If the papers get their way we will loose some fantastic breeds of dog.
It seems that nobody is prepared to even look at the possibility the owner could even slightly be to blame which tbh, makes me very .
I just hope that if the government does step in that they will recommend decent dog training and licences (at owner expense) rather than just killing off a certain breed only to move onto the next breed a few years later.

[ruty]

er, why are they fantastic, these breeds? And why is is 'killing off'' breeds? You can allow dogs to mate with different breeds, can't you? I really don't get this fascination with breeding dogs until they get hip malformities [eg Alsations] or noses that they can't breathe out of [eg bull dog] or just bloody horrible aggressive natures [eg rottweilers, bull terriers] . Pointless. And harmful all round.