I was wondering, “Did they put down the parent who left their child unsupervised with a dog long enough to put 31 frigging staples in their dog’s ear?”
It might be urban legend, but I’d guess there have been thousands of similar situations that have gone un-noted. People really suck sometimes. 
I was hoping for a happy update from the OP…
I’ve been on both ends of this stick.
Was out in a field when a 5 local dogs running together came by. They turned and started towards me. They we not acting like they wanted to just play. I got to a large stick that was on the ground and ran them off. One circled back & was more determined to attack. I defeated him. It scared the stuffing out of me.
I have also seen a dog & packs of dogs go for livestock, chickens to horses, & they never seem to be playing. They are earnest in trying to bring whatever they are chasing.
I have never seen nor heard of a dog that has killed livestock ever only do it once, they seem to get a taste for it. ( pun intended )
Very few country folks lock up or make their dogs stay in a fenced area, especially working dogs.
The best working dogs I know of are Border Collies & they almost never turn livestock killer. But when they do, there is no way to retrain them that I have even heard of someone trying.
We have 7 cats ( 6 are feral saves, drops, one was an injured & dumped cat . ) & one huge unfixed dog from a neighbor. He lives with us full time because they ignore the him.
This dog has bitten a teenager & been quarantined but no charges were filed so he got to go back to the owners. ( Before he came to stay with us. ) IMO, he was surprised & thought he was being attacked or something. He guards both places & considers it all his territory to protect.
We can take food from his mouth, work on sores, pull stickers, without him doing anything more than pulling away if it really hurts. With the wife, he will let her hurt him more that I can. Sweet dog but… Unfixed, neighbor does not want that, he is 100 pounds, half St.Bernard & half Pyrenees so, not a real aggressive breed…
But… if he came home covered in blood with the guy across the road in hot pursuit from the dog killing, being in a pack that was killing live stock, he would have to go down.
I would want to try to retrain him but I need to live here also & that means that he would need to be put down. Not only me but every country person I have known knows that they ‘have a taste’ for it after doing it once.
I will take my animals over a lot of humans I know and they better remember that but in the end, some things can not be undone without a major expense in time & money to even try to retrain, some people are like that also.
So, having spent the time & effort to tame an feral cat or two, having owned or cared for dogs for almost 20 years all together, of several breeds, been around them all my life, slept in the stall with my horse at one stage in my life, etc. I am fully aware that not all animals can be saved from their nature anymore than all people can.
I can’t look at shelter adds or Facebook, cries for help to save some innocent animal that is just unwanted, not a behavioral problem, because I feel it is humans fault that they are in that position in the first place. Whole nuther rant…
So, I my experience, I have never heard of a dog that actually killed or help kill & also fed on livestock to be redeemed or retrained successively.
Dogs kill & eat all kinds of animals without ever going for livestock, I do not understand it all but there seems to be something happens when this is done in a pack.
Nuff from me.
I’m sorry, there is no happy update. My former foster dog was euthanized last week. I shed a lot of tears, and I ache for the sweet girl she could be, but I understand and accept the rescue’s decision. She was a difficult dog, and would have been extremely difficult to place in the future with a bite history on top of her other issues. It sucks that this is how it had to end for her.
Every step of the way, it seems this dog was failed. The breeder who sold her to an inappropriate home, the owner who allowed her to escape and never claimed her from the shelter, the shelter that placed her twice and had her returned each time before dumping her on the rescue, and somewhere in there at the end, me, the rescue and the adoptive family.
My girl couldn’t be saved, but there is, sadly, no shortage of dogs in need. Foster, adopt, donate money or food or time, do something to help another dog.
WOW!
No. At the slaughter house, they are penned in solid walled pens (think a flock to each pen and they have water and room to move around easily). Then run through a solid walled squeeze chute that is based on a circle pattern that slowly forces them down to single file. They’ve likely been through these types of chutes at least four other times in their life, so it isn’t new. The solid walls keep them calm. It is nothing like a snapping dog growling and running at them and terrorizing them.
No, the first purpose of breeding is to improve your flock and produce animals that can be sold to improve other farmer’s flocks.
That is why farmers spend huge amounts on Rams with traits that you need in your flock and you typically need to obtain a new Ram every couple years. These Rams improve everything from the quality of fiber, to meat, to the ability to easily and safely twin out lambs. Some might be picked to improve the flock’s ability to survive local conditions (like heat or humidity).
On average, you keep the best 10% of lams as replacement animals for those who are aging out of productivity. The rest are sold off for either meat or as animals to other farmers. A lamb sold to another farm to improve his flock will pay far more than one sold for meat. Meat is the most common product, but it is not the most profitable. It is far better to get twice as much for a high quality animal because then you only need half as many ewes to produce the same income.
This is just plain ignorant. Someone lets their mutt run loose and it kills animals that are the product of over a decade (maybe even multiple decades) of breeding… once those animals are dead, they’re dead. The genetics used to make them are gone (sheep live only 10 years, there is no AI or frozen seamen for sheep, so once the ram is dead, those genetics are gone)
Because they were bred for that if they go to slaughter. Fiber sheep do not go to slaughter. Serious breeders sell all of their high quality off spring to other farms for their flocks. If a sheep is born of low quality, or the ewe is showing traits they don’t want passed on, then those lambs go to slaughter. Why would you keep the genetics around?
Please post a link to the sheep slaughter facility that you are imagining? This is just an asinine statement. Sheep are not “torn apart by machines” at any point in the slaughter process.
I probably used the wrong word upthread when I said “play” - but dogs that worry sheep are not “hunting” in the sense that a predator hunts prey. They do not stop once they have killed one animal. They go into a chase frenzy, and will kill as many as they are able.
And as for slaughterhouses (and I know plenty about them and the processes in them), at least in there the animals are killed (and killed painlessly, I’ve read the research papers and talked to the researchers) before anything else happens to them - dogs don’t bother, they cause pain and distress and injury and leave suffering animals to be put down by the farmers.
One Easter Sunday when I was in my early teens, we lost 6 breeding ewes to 3 neighborhood dogs who tore into the flock. We would have lost more if my uncle’s father-in-law, a vet, wasn’t 10 minutes away having Sunday dinner with the family. We had a small, boutique sheep farm, no more than 50 head all told, and it wasn’t our primary source of income, but the damage to the flock was severe and while it wasn’t like losing a beloved pet (or six) the emotional trauma was significant as well.
As far as we were able to determine, none of the dogs had a history of aggression, no biting incidents or anything else of note. But as si_blakely said, they didn’t hunt the sheep in a normal predator/prey dynamic. They gut ripped one and moved to the next and would have kept on going if we hadn’t seen them out the window.
I didn’t see it in Snopes and I didn’t see the FOAF as that, perhaps because they were Vets. If I got suckered, then I got suckered.
Still, if there were 8 staples in the dogs ear, that’s 8 staples too many.
I’m sorry, brainstall. My own dog is a strange, withdrawn, grumpy, reactive Shepherd mix, with tons of issues when I got him. He’s lucky I’ve been able to put up with his butt all these years - and with training and old age, he’s fairly mellow now (I’ve had him for 8 years, he hasn’t been aggressive towards me for 6).
All dogs are capable of biting a human. Every dog has a different threshold, and different triggers. It’s a rare dog with a biting history which can’t be kept safely by responsible owners - but there aren’t enough homes with the right environment and owners so dedicated, to save even a fraction of the dogs who need them.
That staple story sounds fake as hell to me, if only because as a long-time dog owner, I’ve had to deal with the tiniest of dog ear wounds splattering blood everywhere. 32 staples? Everyone would notice. Besides, a lab has rather thick ears - it’d be a challenge for a toddler to get one staple through
I think the point is that there were no staples in the non-dog’s ear.
I’m so sorry, Brainstall! My heart aches for you. I don’t know how I missed this thread the first time around. I do know how you are feeling. I work with pit bulls at our city shelter, a program sponsored by Chako Pit Bull Rescue. I have been in your shoes. A dog comes in, failed by the breeder and failed by the person who bought him from the irresponsible breeder. The shelters workers do their best, but it’s not enough. Foster families and other volunteers do their best, but sometimes it’s still not enough. I have shed countless tears for dogs that ended up euthanized, because there was just no more we could do.
You’re right, there is always something we can do for the dogs that remain. Volunteer, foster, donate a bag of food to your local shelter or pet food pantry.
If a dog in my care faced euthanasia because of biting, I’d rather have its teeth pulled and feed it mush for the rest of its life than put it down.
And who would you have perform the full mouth extraction? Most veterinarians and veterinary governing boards believe it to be an in humane procedure, and one that will not guarantee the dog to be safe. Cite.:dubious:
That seems to be the allegation alright.
How about we pull all your teeth and feed you mush for the rest of your life? In my opinion, it is the owner’s fault when an animal under their care injures anyone else. Owners accept this responsibility by euthanizing an animal that they’ve demonstrated that they can’t (or won’t) control.
What a horrible thing to do! If the dog is human aggressive, it should be put down, not tortured.
It’s important to remember that dogs, unlike us, don’t fear death. But they do feel and fear pain, and can suffer if the quality of their life is reduced. There are many worse things to do to a dog than euthanize it, IMO.
Exactly. There are a LOT of dogs out there and so many that we can’t be invested in every one. We need to be sensible and put a dog down rather than torture it because we’re comparing a dog to a human in a quality of life assessment. (If you’ve ever had to put an old dog with health problems down, you’ve learned the sad truth that they’ll never quit. So you literally have to quit for them. And it SUCKS.)
I just started volunteering at a wildlife rescue. My husband thinks he might be interest but he wants to know how sad it is first. And I have to say, it’s sad… in a way. They make a decision, or try to, in the first 24 hours as to whether something needs to be euthanized, because outside of a few education animals if a wild animal can’t be released and it’s not a rare creature then it needs to be put down. And I don’t want to have to do that but I’m okay with it… as long as it happens quick and the animal doesn’t suffer and I don’t get to “know” it. So I’ve only been there a few weeks but so far it isn’t sad.
ETA -by “can’t be released” I should clarify - I mean, if a possum will be blind, it needs to be put down. If a bird has a broken pelvis it needs to be put down… except we have a pileated woodpecker who can’t fly but it’s a rareish bird so we’re looking for a breeding program. If it were a robin it would have been put down on intake. We will rehab anything, even at a huge time suck, that can be rehabbed. I didn’t want to give the impression that anything that can’t be fixed in a day we put down.