The root cause of this issue is this: that dog breeding, selling, and keeping, is without any regulation, at any level of government. The PCA Act says only that a dog must have food, water, and shelter. The SPCA does not seize a yard dog if those three things are even minimally supplied. It has said, even recently, that a house overhang is shelter. The SPCA stopped AAS from getting improvements to the Act.

Politicians and the SPCA have been afraid of the angry backlash from dog lovers who have no idea what the root causes are of this issue, and so they have all done nothing except deny the truth; politicians to protect votes, the SPCA to protect donations. The SPCA just said yesterday on radio that cocker spaniels bite too. That is a red herring meant to steer the discussion into a dead end, and it has worked successfully for many years with anyone who is not quick enough to spot the fallacy - that society has no need to protect itself from cocker spaniels, for a number of reasons, but mainly because they have been bred for companionship, and are manageably small, not bred for protection/fighting and uncontrollably large and powerful.

Professor Stanley Coren, a world-renown dog expert, pointed up falsity of the SPCA's statement when he said that no one has to worry about a pack of Chihuahuas.

Dog lovers can say the problem is bad people, not bad dogs, until the cows come home, but they will change nothing. It is almost impossible to control bad people or to educate the uneducatable. But society must prevent another child from being ripped slowly to death. To stop this from happening again, root causes must be dealt with.

To stop the cruel isolation that so many dogs suffer from, as the most dangerous of the four dogs suffered, in a pen in the backyard, root causes must be dealt with.

AAS seems to be the only one facing root causes and proposing solutions that deal with both the danger and the cruelty.