Immediately Following the Horrific Pit Bull Mauling Death of a Detroit Boy, Defenders of Pit Bulls Come Out Spouting Baseless Propaganda.

Along with the new package of Michigan preemption bills that will strip the authority from local units of government to enforce breed safety laws, and on the heels of the horrific pit bull mauling death of a little boy in Detroit, Lovell Anderson, age 4, come the defenders and promoters of pit bulls- the pit bull lobby. They deny breed traits and try to justify the ever-growing number of maimed and dead children, killed violently by blood sport dogs. “It’s not the breed it’s the owner”, “no one can identify a pit bull without DNA”, they spout with zero data to back their claims.

Celeste Dunn, an attorney belonging to the Animal Law Section of the State Bar, was interviewed on CBS News. Dunn said that she thinks the stories about pit bull mauling deaths are “sensationalized”. She then mentioned a child who was bitten by a Labradoodle that received 27 stitches on his head, but “that did not make the news”. That she compared a fatal mauling to a “bite” shows appalling disregard for the overwhelming data that proves pit bull type dogs kill more than all other dog breeds combined. There have been over 700 Americans fatally mauled by pit bulls, and thousands more severely disfigured, dismembered and disabled by pit bulls.

The West Michigan Humane Society introduced a “New Class to Educate Youth About Pit Bulls” on October 19, 2023, the very next day after Lovell Anderson was killed. In their effort to find homes for the huge number of undesirable pit bull type dogs filling shelters across the U.S., humane organizations show depraved indifference to the suffering caused by dangerous breed dogs. Their denial of the genetic heritage and propensities of the pit bull class of dogs does not help their mission to place them in new adoptive homes.

West Michigan Humane Society as well as many other shelters across the United States state that they omit dog breed labels. “We label as mixed until we can do, you know, breed-specific DNA testing on them. But when you walk through the shelter, we can’t really just judge every dog and say everything is this or that. We just don’t know one way or the other,” Humane Society of West Michigan Education Coordinator Amy Heddy said. Really? People have been visually identifying dog breeds for centuries. The AKC has been labeling dog breeds and describing breed confirmation and attributes for well over 100 years. Ms. Heddy also discounts multiple rulings that high courts across the United States have held that “a dog owner of ordinary intelligence can identify a pit bull” as well as the ruling that “pit bulls are inherently dangerous”.

Purposely mislabeling or omitting dog breed information is a deceptive practice. Shelters should know this practice alone, sets the dogs up to fail. Omitting breed labels does not help to place dogs in appropriate homes. The public needs to know what kind of dog they are adopting. The public relies on animal shelters to provide the right information about the dogs they bring home to their families. They need to know if a dog has a bite history or a history of aggression as well as knowing the breed type.

“Nobody should be necessarily afraid of pit bulls because any dog could be aggressive or any dog could be sweet,” Matilda Nielsen, a student in the class, said. “We just want them to go about when they (kids) meet pit bulls, we don’t want them to be scared…” said Amy Heddy. Scared of Pit Bulls? You Better Be!

That shelters promote pit bulls as “safe family pets” is resulting in an epidemic of serious injury and death. Michigan needs a Mandatory Bite Disclosure Law to hold shelters accountable when their disinformation and placement of dangerous dogs in adoptive homes causes grievous injury.