Let's kill all the pit bulls

Another day, another pit bull attack:

ABILENE, Texas -- A 7-year-old boy died after he was attacked by pit bulls while playing outside near his rural home, authorities said.

A driver saw Tanner Joshua Monk of Breckenridge lying next to a road near Hubbard Lake on Sunday with two pit bulls nearby and stopped to check on the child, Stephens County Sheriff Jim Reeves said. When she left her car, the dogs became aggressive and she called 911, he said.

The dogs also became aggressive toward the two deputies who arrived, and they shot and killed them. The deputies found that Tanner was dead, Reeves said in Monday's edition of the Abilene Reporter-News.

Tanner was found alone about 150 yards from his house and 50 to 75 yards from his neighbor's house where he had been playing with some friends, Reeves told The Associated Press on Monday. The two pit bulls, along with two others seized at the scene by law enforcement, belonged to those neighbors, Reeves said.

[snip]

It was the second serious pit bull attack on a child in four days in Texas.

On Wednesday in Fort Worth, a woman's two pit bulls attacked her 2-year-old niece as she was preparing to give the child a bath, police said. The little girl was critically injured, and her aunt also was injured as she lay over the child trying to protect her, police said.

Well, not kill all the pit bulls, but I think this breed should be outlawed. Period. The end. Tired of reading stories like this. You may disagree. But it sure is funny how we keep hearing about pit bull attacks. One of my colleagues in my department at work was bitten by one while out walking his dog in his neighborhood. We were trapped in our house by one a couple of years ago, on Christmas Day. There was this awful case a Dallas journalist wrote about last year:

Just before 7 pm Halloween eve last year, a block from Reinhardt Elementary School in Northeast Dallas, my 3-year-old granddaughter Hailey and her older sister Moriah waited with candy bags open at the entry of a small bungalow on a street filled with children doing the same thing. Hailey didn’t even have time to say “trick or treat” before a pit bull rushed out the door, past its owner, and wrapped its jaws around her abdomen. In a fortunate split-second, given the propensity of pits to sink in and gut their victims, the owner pulled the dog off and hurled it back into the house. The velvet cloth of Hailey’s princess costume offered just enough protection to take most of the bite. But at the hospital emergency room, it was easy to detect red pinprick marks and punctures in a perfect oval imprint of upper and lower teeth. Hailey recovered with only two lingering scars, plus a fear of large dogs that hasn’t gone away. The dog, a female, was quarantined for a few days, then returned to its owner, who has yet to pay a medical bill. Under current state and city law, he wasn’t even charged with a misdemeanor.

Hailey was lucky. In Combine, at the Dallas-Kaufman county line, 2-year-old Carolina Sotello was killed March 22 by one of her own family’s pit bulls—on a chain. The girl had gotten too close on her tricycle. A few days earlier, in Mesquite, 3-year-old Breanna Webster was attacked and disfigured by a neighbor’s golden retriever when she stepped on his paw. In San Antonio, 10-year-old Amber Jones was killed in January by a pit bull she was trying to free from a fence. In Conroe, 41-year-old David McCurry was attacked and killed by a pit bull he had come to buy from its owner. In Fort Worth, animal control agent Jennifer Phillips was attacked by two pit bull mixes—whose owners had let them run loose—that were headed directly for an elderly woman and some children.

Pit bull. Pit bull. Pit bull. Pit bull mix. Golden retriever. Pit bull. See a pattern here?