Legislature must protect victims of dog attacks

By Irene Solesky
7:30 a.m. EST, January 10, 2014

Dog bites are tracked by the health department because they are injurious and can cause death. Dog bites and mauling by law are a public welfare concern that has nothing to with dog owners’ rights and everything to do with dog owners’ responsibilities. When a bite or mauling incident occurs, humans instinctively seek help from first responders and physicians, not humane groups and veterinary doctors.

The standards pertaining to dog bites are set forth by law in Maryland Health General Article 18-217. It is not the place of animal advocates to be the architects of public safety policy but rather to apply their vocation for animal welfare, to establish and guide dog owners on how best to meet their responsibilities as required by public safety officials…

Read full letter at the Baltimore Sun

Making rescued pit bulls pets is an unnatural selection

By Tony Solesky
2:55 p.m. EST, November 14, 2013

I fully support liberating any animal from abuse. It does not follow however, that rescued animals — pit bulls in particular — should be pushed as companion pets by shelters and rescue organizations.

Terry Douglass of Baltimore became the 25th dog bite related fatality nationally this year when she was mauled to death by her own pit bull on Nov. 1. In the days since her passing there have been three more of these gruesome deaths, according to DogBites.org. Nearly all of the 28 people killed by dogs — 15 of them children ranging in ages from 14 months to 7 years — were killed by pit bulls.

My wife Irene and I have spent the last six years of our lives advocating for dog bite and mauling victims. In 2007, our then 10-year-old son, Dominic, and his 9-year-old playmate, Scotty, were mauled by a neighbor’s pit bull in an alley behind our Towson home. Dominic was critically wounded, suffering a femoral artery tear when he and two other children attempted to assist Scotty…

Read full editorial at the Baltimore Sun

Pit Bull and Other Dangerous Breeds

It is not a matter of nature or nurture, it is the nature of nurture that matters.

In nature what holds intrinsic value nurtures itself unmolested by man. Mans nature is  to nurture  and  it will often naturally  create value in his own  mind where none actually exists. In marketing this is observed as creating a market and then marketing to it. One such market, is the animal rescue industry. Animal rescue organizations, are founded to address the  problem they themselves have created and these organizations are built on  a natural desire to help, reflected in the reality that they are largely  a volunteer/slave labor force. Dedicated souls, tirelessly searching for adoptive pet parents,  while simultaneously overwhelmed by an endless supply of unwanted pets that have resulted  by their own actions and beliefs. The contemptible aspect of it all, is that this is a marketing scheme, designed and propagated by the animal care and supply industry who intentionally created a conundrum that naturally  exploits mans nature to nurture and  then sentences us all to a infinite struggle over  trying to solve the issue of whether  nature verses nurture. A struggle that can’t be won  only perpetuated because in nature itself, this conflict does not exist. Fostering this plight is akin to tasking us  to determine which side of the same coin has the greatest influence on its overall value. Drowning  in a unending sea of unwanted pets, the debate is an infinitely repeating decimal locked in  the nature of mans evil marketing genius. The question and debate over what causes dangerous dogs, is not  one of which is it, nature or nurture, yet  paradoxically, if it where, the answer is a resounding yes.

Nature is the mechanics of those things that occur in the environment outside of mans influence. The influence of these natural mechanics upon living beings are called instincts. A species is a living being that possesses different instinctual traits one from another species but is perpetually driven by naturally occurring and reoccurring impulses  to reproduce only  with others like itself  who posses  those traits that are unique only  to their own kind. Where the domestic canine is concerned, the species begins and ends where any two domestic canines regardless of their particular breed Pit bull to Poodle, will by natural instinct mate to any other domestic canine breed. Breeding  is an act by man who discriminates between and chooses among, a collection of naturally occurring instinctual traits possessed by the  domestic canines he pairs , in order to  nurture  predictable behavioral and physical outcome in them.   In the dog world, the resulting canines are called a dog breed and they are distinguished one from another  by virtue of the fact that the resulting  bred dogs,  lack an inherit instinct to reproduce only like dog  breeds. Simply stated, if man wants another Poodle-or any specific dog breed for that matter – he must breed another Poodle, each time, every time. Breeding is the outcome of  the nature of what man wants not the nature of what the animal  naturally wants.  Humans who engage in this activity are called breeders.

Man nurtures the breed process  along by using  dogs with specific instinctual group traits so as to produce dogs that will be born with a natural desire to perform the tasks man wishes to train them to do. Training is  merely the completion of the harmony  that nurtures  this behavior  by directing those dog  to the tasks  they innately  are born and breed to do. This understanding  is why you have never seen a Norman Rockwell painting of a Pit bull pointing quail  or  retrieving a duck . Rabbit hunters seek breeders of beagles to obtain dogs that can readily be directed to hunt rabbits. Not all canines can be trained to do this and for those where it may even be possible, the value in expending such effort into a training regime yields a highly diminished return. Especially when contrasted against a beagle that requires only that you release it a field . Nowhere can we observe the perversion of natural  harmony  then in the efforts  by some to promote and who  attempt to use obedience  training to disrupt the  flow of naturally inbred instincts in  Pit bull dogs. Fueled by mans  natural resistance of nature there is the  complete contradiction of  nature and a failing  to accept that the unprecedented carnage and fatalities among humans, pets and Pit bull dogs alike is a natural  result of his nurturing and  engineering nature. Obedience training is not the changing of instinct, obedience training is nothing more then mans lording over a dog. Mans refusal to be obedient to nature is paradoxically reflected in the nature of  the Pit bulls he has engineered and remains infinitely  the nature of their beast.