Well I’m in favour.
I’ve had a lot of dogs in my life. Personally I don’t think privately owned dogs should be trained to be “guard” or “attack” dogs. Police dogs are a different matter, as they are handled in a controlled environment and such.
But I feel there is just too much of a possibility for veyr unfortunate accidents when it comes to training dogs to attack humans privately.
As a sidenote I live in rural Virginia so the issue of neighbors being attacked by dogs does not exist for me.
Unless a dog has a mental defect, then ANY breed of dog can be trained to not attack humans just for invading territory. Now, dogs are living creatures, so if provoked enough (by physical tormenting to unreasonable degrees et cetra) it may attack, but in such cases it would clearly be the fault of the person doing the provoking.
I do believe it is good to have a dog that barks to alert of visitors.
I have a little schnauzer that barks very excitedly anytime anyone approaches the home. I know when my wife is coming home before I can see her car turn round a corner towards our driveway, my dog hears it that far away.
However my dog has been carefully trained to heel and stop doing his little alert routine on command. This was mainly essential due to the fact schnauzers have very “unique” barks that will drive you insane if allowed to continue unrestrained.
Also my dog has never even attempted to engage in any physical confrontation with a person.
Even at times when say the dog is sitting on the front porch and I’m inside (rare, as it’s more of an inside dog and doesn’t like being left alone) he will sit back and bark (but never growl) at delivery people et cetra.
Also, as a sidenote while barking can be for virtually any reason growling is considered almost ALWAYS aggressive when directed towards others from a dog.
Although dogs growling when they are chasing their own tail (I’ve seen this) is probably just oddball dog behavior.
Anyways it truly saddens me to see the behavior of some dogs, dogs are animals that have been bred to live with humans for probably at least ten thousand years. They make excellent companions and are considered highly intelligent (I hear new studies all the time that rank their intelligence higher and higher) animals.
The only dogs that are truly incompatible with humans are dogs that haven’t been properly trained or severely abused. Even a stray dog (say one born without ever being owned by humans) won’t behave so badly as to run people down and attack them. Strays often behave somewhat like wild animals in that they growl and act defensive if you corner them or threaten them, but for a dog to attack a human deliberately goes against not only the domistication and breeding of the dog, but even the age old natural instinct of the dog. (Wild dog species like wolves respond to humans much like most wild animals do, they will attack you if you make them think they HAVE to fight, but they prefer to avoid confrontation and have a healthy fear of you because you are a tall creature that is large and menacing to them)
As for the legal aspects, dogs are much like any other potentially injury causing thing on your property.
Sure, there are cases of burglars successfully suing their victims because they injured themselves on their property. But these cases are exceptions, typically the burglar doesn’t even try to sue, and in lots of these cases the burglar doesn’t get jack shit for their effort.
It typically takes some pretty slick lawyering to pull off these stunts and that is why they tend to make the news when they happen.
In some jurisdictions it is easier than others to achieve these legal results. If a lawyer friend of mine in New Orleans isn’t pulling my chain, New Orleans (or probably LA in general) is the only jurisdiction in the country where you cannot be liable if you kill someone who has broken into your home (strictly home, not just property in general.)
As for someone tricking you onto their property and then sicking their attack dogs on you, in a criminal trial it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to prove you weren’t committing a crime. For example if it was a neighbor of yours, simply testimony from other neighbors that you had been invited onto the property before would cast a severely bad light on the owner of the dogs. And if you were dressed in slacks and a polo shirt and were on the lawn of a neighbor in broad daylight it would be hard to sell you as trying to commit some crime.
Do invisible fences stop zombie dogs?
Your ludicrously belligerent response aside, you do realize you are replying to a post from 2004, right? Are you likewise still writing angry letters to George W. Bush?
Maybe he OP will come back and tell us how the situation was resolved.
I always wanted to have my picture taken near a sign for an INVISIBLE FENCE while holding one of these:
It was worth reviving the thread for that. That was hilarious.
The lifespan of a German Shepherd is 9-13 years.
Those dogs are dead, man. You basically killed them when you bumped this thread.
Ha, Schrodinger’s dog, eh?
I agree that this response was “ludicrously belligerent”, but it’s also not wrong. This whole trend we’ve been seeing lately (far more recently than 2004) of “free range parenting” is surely endangering a lot of kids.
A more measured version of the argument I cosign:
And those bites were unprovoked too, then?
Better yet, be a responsible neighbor (rather than a narcissistic sociopath) and don’t get those sorts of animals as pets in the first place.
Fuck that shit, that can make people who are doing nothing wrong on public property feel just as threatened, particularly if there are no immediately-obvious restraints.
Some fuckhead’s pet is not more important than the right of people to enjoy public property without feeling threatened.
I suspect that the kind of owner who’s enough of a selfish, narcissistic sociopath to keep these kind of dogs in the first place, isn’t going to be terribly diligent about replacing the batteries when they start giving the low-battery notification.
What a bunch of nonsense.
So children too young to know better should suffer to teach the parents a lesson?
That’s seriously an incredibly depraved and sociopathic thing to say.
I’ll bet a lot of money you haven’t come across post #83 yet.
I wasn’t interested in wasting my time responding to a post by an account named “fuckoffbitch200” that appears to have been created to respond specifically to the OP.
Of course, it wasn’t until the subsequent post that I realized that this thread, and all the posts I was responding to, was nearly fifteen years old.
You sure do like calling people sociopaths.
That’s okay, because I like being called a sociopath. It’s right up there with fuckhead.
(Aggressive dog) owners tend to exhibit so much sociopathic behavior that, well, they are sociopaths (a lot of them are aggressive (dog owners), too).
Pepper spray as a solution? I don’t know about Connecticut, but I was told that here in Massachusetts, you have to have a firearm id card for pepper spray. And certainly people can’t just go jogging around with a firearm. This isn’t Florida, you know. :p:D