Screen And License Masters Of Murderous Mutts

Generally, I have a fairly strong stomach.

I’ve watched charred bodies being dragged from plane crashes. I’ve seen more than my share of blood-soaked crime victims. I’ve even seen a few floaters - corpses dragged from rivers in advanced states of decomposition. There’s a sight to inspire nightmares.

But I was jarred by a color photograph I saw last week in my home newspaper. There was William Messier, the 75-year-old pedestrian who was mauled by two pit bulls.

He was leaving court in Cohoes, a blue collar Albany suburb, after a judge had ordered the dogs killed. Messier’s face was ripped and chewed. His arms were bandaged. Blood seeped visibly through the gauze.

As a dog lover - I have two now, and I’ve never been without at least one my entire life - I winced at that picture. I’m glad we ran it, as disturbing as it was, because it reflected a harsh reality that our politicians need to confront. That’s this:

Certain breeds of dogs are dangerous, both because of their breeding and because they tend to be owned by people who don’t understand them. Or, more unsettling, they’re owned by unsavory characters who understand them all too well and keep them around as legal weapons.

Foremost among these breeds are pit bulls and Rottweilers. Many of these animals make fine pets. But genes are genes. Statistically, pit bulls and Rottweilers are more likely than other breeds to explode like time bombs.

Dr. Jeff Sacks, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, issued a report last month on dog attacks. In 1986, dog attacks prompted 585,000 people to seek medical attention. In 1994, the last year for which complete records are available, that number jumped to 800,000.

That’s an increase of 37 percent in eight years. Meanwhile, during the same period, the total population of dogs in the country increased only 2 percent.

What else happened during that period? Just this:

More people developed an interest in owning dogs originally bred for protection and fighting. Rottweilers went from being the nation’s 15th most popular breed to second place, right behind Labrador retrievers. And, since 1979, Rottweilers have killed 29 people across the country.

That’s nothing, however, compared to pit bulls, the No. 1 killing breed. Bred for fighting, pit bulls killed 60 people in that time frame. It’s not clear just how dramatically the number of pit bulls has increased, since they aren’t recognized as a breed by the American Kennel Club.

Pit bulls are all over urban areas, though. They’re status symbols. Hey, see what a tough dog I have. Am I cool, or what?

They’re also very big in crime circles. The guys who owned the pit bulls that chewed up William Messier aren’t exactly strangers to the criminal justice system. One of them just finished serving six months on a felony drug charge.

Dogs are like people only in this respect: They tend to respond to kindness with kindness and to cruelty with cruelty. They’re different from people in this regard: Different breeds tend to respond in different ways to the same stimuli. Faced with identical circumstances, different breeds receive different orders from their genes.

It’s simply true that, dog for dog, you’re more likely to be attacked by a pit bull or Rottweiler than by a golden retriever. Those odds go up when dogs bred to guard or fight are owned by boneheads who think that canine aggression is really nifty.

If politicians are going to permit people to own dogs like this - and in Denver, for example, they don’t - more care needs to be exercised. Forget licensing the dogs. As we do with guns, let’s check out the owners and license them instead.

And no jerks need apply.

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