• 25
  • August
    2011

"We may never know why it happened," Captain Dave Bertini says, referring to a vicious dog bite attack that ended in the deaths of a woman and her unborn baby, as Dan Whitcomb reports for Reuters.

Darla Napora's husband got home and found her lying on the floor with the male pit bull hovering and "bloodied." The female pit bull was on its haunches in the corner of the room, "cowering."

Analysis of teeth marks revealed that the bloodied male pit bull - his name was Gunner - was responsible for the attack. (The female pit bull did not participate.) Napora's husband locked Gunner up in a back room, but he escaped, and the police shot and killed him on the lawn.

As Whitcomb reports, Captain Bertini says there's nothing indicating the pit bulls had been "trained to be aggressive," but that seems to be the thing with pit bulls - they can attack without warning or provocation, at least according to some groups.

But, according to the CDC, any dog can become a dangerous dog. PitBulls.org quotes a CDC report that advocates not making law and policy decisions based on the breed of dog: "Breed-specific legislation does not address the fact that a dog of any breed can become dangerous when bred or trained to be aggressive."

According to PitBulls.org, pit bulls actually have a roughly 85 percent pass rate for temperament, above the 77 percent average for all dogs, showing that "a dog is almost 100 percent a product of its owner and the training it receives."

Sources:

Reuters, "Pregnant woman killed by pit bull died from blood loss, shock," by Dan Whitcomb, 08/15/11

PitBulls.org, "Are Pit Bulls Dangerous?"