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W-FIVE: Bred to Bite, part one 10:05

W-FIVE: Bred to Bite, part two 9:29

Bred to bite

CTV.ca News Staff

From a distance, playing in the park on a cold, sunny winter day with his mom, older sister and golden retrievers, three-year-old Ashton Ebinger looks like any normal kid. But if you look closer, you’ll see that his face is severely scarred, and while many young children have a carefree love of animals, it’s actually surprising that Ashton will go anywhere near a dog.

That’s because last summer, he was viciously mauled by a family member’s pet Akita.

The events that led to Ashton’s attack are unclear: he was playing in the backyard when a family member threw the dog a pizza crust. Moments later, his older sister saw the Akita practically ripping her brother apart.

“This was a bite to kill,” says Ashton’s mother, Summer, who was not present at the time of the attack. “This was not a bite to say, ‘Get away from my food,’ or ‘Get away from my water,’ or ‘Don’t touch my toy.’ This was a mauling.”

Ashton’s confrontation with the Akita lasted less than one minute, but it nearly killed him. “He had three-quarters of his scalp ripped back, his right ear was hanging by a thread and had to be sewn back on, his right eyelid was lacerated in half … he had a skull fracture on top of his head and a skull fracture in the back of his head … he had multiple bites to his face, into his neck and underneath his chin as well,” says Summer.

Ashton was rushed to Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital, where four trauma teams worked on him for 18 hours. After his injuries were assessed, doctors braced Summer for the worst. “They took my hand and put it down on the bed and put his hand in mine and they said, ‘If there’s anything you need to say to him mom, you need to say it now because he probably only has 10 minutes to live.’”

Ashton managed to pull through. But months after the attack, his mother is left with the lingering question of who to blame. “What people need to understand (is) this was not relatives that had some vicious animal, and I’m not some mother who took my child and left my child somewhere where he could get hurt. This was a family pet. It is a farm dog that my kids knew and played with – I wrestled with that dog that morning before I went to the doctor’s office. … This isn’t a house we visited once a year either – this is a close family relative, we were over there all the time. This is just something that happened.”

But it’s something that’s happening with increasing and alarming frequency. Last year, three Rottweilers fatally attacked a four-year-old New Brunswick boy; in Vancouver, two bull mastiff-Rottweiler mixes permanently disfigured a teenaged girl – and the list of such tragedies goes on. In the United States, nearly five million people are bitten by dogs each year. In Canada, no one knows for sure how many people are getting attacked – and that’s because no one is really keeping track.

The only available estimates come from a 1998 study in Quebec, undertaken by the province’s coroner in the wake of a dog mauling death. “The study proved that 117,000 Quebecers are bitten by dogs every year,” says Pierre Barnoti of the Montreal SPCA. “Fifty-seven per cent of the 117,000 are kids under the age of 10.”

There are a slew of theories as to why dog attacks are nearing epidemic proportions – from the types of dogs people are taking as pets to breeding and training practices to how we interact with animals.

For starters, breeds that are often considered aggressive – dogs like pit bulls, Rottweilers and Akitas -- are increasingly being taken as household pets. But some experts say these so-called muscle dogs just aren’t meant to be kept in the home environment. “Much of the macho breeds and the bull breeds, they’re bigger, they’re more athletic, they’re more intense, they’re way more aroused and harder to calm than the dogs that we grew up with,” says Sue Sternberg, who runs a dog shelter in upstate New York. “When they’re aggressive, they’re so much more aggressive. Because of their power, because of the level of what they’re capable of, when they bite, it’s usually a mauling. They don’t stop, and they can kill somebody. A 120-pound dog can easily kill somebody.

“I don’t think there’s a reason anywhere to have a domestic dog that is aggressive and that can hurt or hospitalize somebody,” Sternberg adds. “They’re not wolves, they’re not coyotes, they’re not alarm systems, they’re not weapons. We domesticated dogs as companions, and while you might get a certain level of aggression because they’re dogs, … you don’t need or want a dog that’s capable of taking somebody down, the way a predator would take down prey.”

Even so, the high demand for these dogs has led to big business for unscrupulous breeders. “People are breeding these aggressive dogs and producing more aggressive dogs,” says Kerry Vinson, an animal behaviourist in Ontario. “Dogs are bred in unregulated situations. Puppy mills produce huge amounts of dogs that are subsequently sold mostly in pet stores to unsuspecting people. And people don’t appreciate the fact that these genetic predispositions can be transmitted in through these unregulated breeding situations.”

“The way the dogs are bred here in Quebec makes the one who survives the strongest, the meanest, the survivor,” says Barnoti. “And what he had to go through during this breeding will make him an aggressive dog.”

And even dogs that don’t start out that way can be turned aggressive through harsh training procedures. One woman who took a dog training course at a Quebec-based school told W-FIVE, on condition of anonymity, that she witnessed the use of techniques including isolation, sleep and food deprivation, shock, and the use of cattle prods and collars with spikes inside.

“It makes for a very unpredictable dog,” she says. “They’ve been used to being hit, they’ve been used to being kicked. … If the dog is lying down next to you on the couch and you raise your hand to scratch your head and the dog perceives that as a threat that you’re going to hit him, he might jump up and bite or growl at you. It makes for a very unpredictable dog, a time bomb.”

“I’ve come across people using extremely Draconian methods that are, in the long run, very counterproductive,” says Vinson. “They’re just making aggressive dogs more aggressive. Any time that you use aggressive measures to deal with an aggressive dog, you’re going to exacerbate that problem in the long run. You might be able to control that dog, but what about the future?”

Experts say implementing regulatory measures for breeders and trainers as well as spaying and neutering aggressive breeds may be the answer to limiting dog attacks. But they say some of the onus is on dog owners to understand their animals a little better.

“The average dog owner doesn’t have a really good appreciation of the initial signs of aggression in their dog,” says Vinson. “They tend to rationalize it or pass it off. I deal with this all the time – people say, ‘Oh, it’s OK for the dog to growl at me if I walk by him and he’s got his food bowl, because it’s his food, isn’t it?’ Well, no, it’s not OK because this can progress to much worse behaviour.”

Also important is teaching children to recognize aggressive cues. “We go to schools and have discovered that most of the kids, when shown a diagram of a dog just about to attack, interpret the image as a dog wanting to play,” says the SPCA’s Barnoti.

Summer Ebinger, whose son Ashton was viciously mauled, is determined that other families avoid the horror hers experienced because of a vicious Akita. “I started a program called Dog Awareness for Everyone and Youths (DAFEY). … I take Ripley with me – he’s our male golden retriever, and we demonstrate for children why they can’t do certain things with dogs – why they can’t put their face way down in front of a dog, … if you’re running around screaming and yelling around a dog, the dog may come up and nip you just to make you be quiet – so to respect their space.”

She says it has helped her to cope with almost losing her son. “It’s definitely my therapy. I like to think that things happen for a reason. If this happened for a reason, maybe the reason is just so that we could get out there and educate other families, so that this won’t happen to another family. Because I can’t imagine anyone else going through this. It’s just horrifying – you can’t even explain it, there are no words.”