The City is proposing...

- Higher licence fees.
- Requiring owners of vicious dogs to carry $1 million in liability insurance.
- Requiring owners to notify the city within 24 hours if the dog has got loose or attacked another dog or a person.
- Requiring them to display a "vicious dog" warning sign.

These things will tend to reduce the number of dogs that have attacked once, but someone has to be a victim before this takes effect. That victim will be a child in about 75% of the cases. And whereas an adult can probably save its life from a 45lb Pit bull, even adults will be helpless against the 100 to 200lb dogs that are coming.

Many Pit bull defenders want owners of dangerous breeds to be "educated". Aside from the impossible logistics of forcing people to "get educated", I don't believe the onus can be put back on the owners of pit bulls. They have their reasons for owning this breed. Either they are criminals, using the dogs to protect their club house or their grow-op, or they fight them, or they are not very bright. Educated people are not attracted to pit bulls.

Pit bulls are not only far more dangerous than other breeds, but they suffer the most too. We know that fighting goes on in BC, mostly on the Fraser Valley reserves. We know that dogs are bought from pounds and SPCAs, or got free from owners dumping their pet dog, to use in training. And that the dead or the fatally injured are left to die in ditches or thrown in the river. They live miserable lives on chains, they are beaten and slammed into walls to make them tough. And most of them die young, killed by a pound or an SPCA.

An ad in the Province: Prezapitbul Gladiator pups. $1500. We won't be able to rescue and rehabilitate Presa Canario Pit bull crosses when they are suffering on the ends of chains and we don't want to read about a child being ripped to pieces by one either. There is no sane rationale for a civilized society to have dogs like these.

We phoned the breeder of the Prezapitbul and were told that the dogs are "secret weapons" from ancient Rome, and that the males can be 120 - 140 lbs. He said that they are the ultimate weapons and won't hesitate to take a man down. Presa dogs are the dogs that killed Diane Whipple in San Francisco.

AAS phoned another Fraser Valley breeding facility and were told they plan to breed Fila mastiffs, also called Brazilian mastiffs - crosses between English mastiff, greyhound and bloodhound. The owner said, "They bite - no warning, just come up and bite. Can jump six foot fences. Can be over 200 lbs. Bred to chase slaves and for jaguar hunting". Will sell pups for $2000 and up.

Also coming - Cane Corso, Argentino dogos, Bull Mastiffs Fila Mastiffs. Are we mad! When do we call a halt to this?

I have never met a dog I didn't like, and there are many safe pit bulls, but they weren't bred to be safe. To deny that they are bred to attack and fight to the death and that many do that, you have to deny genetics work, that retrievers retrieve, that hounds track, that herders herd.

Sure cocker spaniels bite, but they don't destroy and they don't kill and it is that danger that society must take steps to protect itself from. Cocker spaniels are possibly one hundred times as common as pit bulls are, so of course the numbers of cocker spaniel bites would be higher, but fatal attacks are what society must protect it schildren from. The only people who use the "cocker spaniel" argument - Pit bull owners, the SPCA, and "dog behaviourists" - are protecting something - either their wish to own a dangerous dog, or their income from dog-loving donators or clients. The "Cocker spaniels bite more often" argument is the SPCA's public stance, but in our opinion the SPCA is not being honest - it doesn't want the public to find out how many more pit bulls and dangerous dogs it kills (because of its many dog control contracts), than anyone else. Killing animals is animal control, not animal welfare.

Here is AAS's web page of dangerous breeds of dogs. They are all here now or are coming soon... and they are going to become common if politicians don't get the backbone to ignore the Pit bull lobby which is composed of an internet network of busy cretins. http://www.animaladvocates.com/dangerous-dogs/dangerous-breeds.htm