ohmidog!

Another newspaper columnist has issued a call for banning pit bulls — this one in Dallas, on the heels of a dog attack that might cost one of its two victims an eye. 

Dallas Morning News columnist Jacquielynn Floyd — who’d previously opposed breed specific legislation –says banning pit bulls “may be the best of a host of imperfect solutions.”

“I hate the idea of blaming animals for human stupidity. And I’m not sure breed banning works – there’s a considerable case to be made that it doesn’t … But we cannot stand around debating theoretical outcomes while people are being attacked on the streets.”

That, to me, sounds a lot like the kind of logic that led us to war in Iraq: Let’s go after them before they come get us. Maybe they’re not the source of most dog bites, but they make a good target.

Then only later — after the considerable expense of corralling, muzzling and regulating them –do we realize that maybe pit bulls aren’t weapons of mass destruction after all.

Floyd admits that, once pit bulls are criminalized, some other breed will replace them.

“Bonehead” owners, to use her term, will move on to Rottweilers, shepherds, Dobermans or some other breed they can encourage to be violent and aggressive. What then? “We’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there,” she says.

Rather than just shifting the problem to another breed, wouldn’t it make more sense to address it now, at its root, and go after the boneheads instead of the dogs?