Another dog that killed a child has been released to an unknown place. A well-funded humaniac group in New York has legally obtained custody of a vicious dog and is taking it to an undisclosed location. See Henderson surrenders dog that fatally mauled child to animal rights group (Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 23, 2014).
It is unbelievable but true that in the past 10 years animal control departments and judges have been sending vicious and killer dogs from one city into other cities. The stated purpose is to rid their city of vicious dogs. Little or no consideration is given to the safety of people living in the destination city. It would be like convicting Charles Manson of murder and giving him a bus ticket out of town as his sentence.
The results have been horrific. According to Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People:
Fatal and disfiguring attacks by pit bulls from shelters and rescues have exploded from zero in the first 90 years of the 20th century to 48 in the past four years, along with 19 fatal & disfiguring attacks by other shelter dogs, mostly Rottweilers & bull mastiffs. The only dogs rehomed from U.S. shelters to kill anyone, ever, before 2000 were two wolf hybrids in 1988 and 1989. 32 shelter dogs have participated in killing people since 2010, 30 of them pit bulls, bull mastiffs, and Rottweilers. The toll on other animals inflicted by pit bulls from shelters is anywhere from 10 to 100 times greater, depending on what the actual reporting frequency of pit bull attacks on other animals is. (Blog post, Landfill Dogs - Saving Fido from death row, accessed 1/24/2014.)
Every state needs to enact 3 laws that would protect residents from this practice. First, it must be made illegal to move a vicious dog from one jurisdiction to another, whether the contemplated move is made by the dog's owners or by the courts or animal control. Second, animal control authorities must have the mandatory duty to confiscate and euthanize any dog brought into the jurisdiction after being declared or found vicious. Third, it must be mandatory that such authorities conduct dangerous dog hearings for allegedly vicioius dogs found within their jurisdictions even where the behavior took place outside the jurisdiction.
