California Injury Blog
I came across this blog posted by Dogsbite.org that talks about two dog attack victims – both adults — in Texas who got their eye ripped out in separate pit bull dog bite attacks. The first incident apparently occurred in Houston on February 22, 2009 when a man named Junior lost an eye after two pit bulls broke out of a kennel and attacked him in the front yard of his neighbor’s home. It was so gruesome that Junior’s eye was popping out of its socket! Neighbors also said the dog chewed out a part of his face.
A similar incident happened in Dallas where two people were seriously injured after two pit bulls that had gotten out of their yard, attacked them. The victims – Helen Fuller and Clarence Webber – were hospitalized. Helen Fuller is expected to lose an eye and her brother says that he knows her life “is going to be changed from this point.” She also suffered severe facial injuries. In the Dallas dog attack case, the pit bulls were picked up by animal control for roaming in the neighborhood, but were later returned to their owner.
This is aggravating because this is not the first time in Texas or here in California that pit bulls have broken out of restraint and gone off their owner’s property to violently attack a human being. According to Dogsbite.org, the combination of pit bulls, rottweilers and wolf hybrids are responsible for:
- 77 percent of attacks that cause bodily harm
- 73 percent of dog attacks on children
- 83 percent of attacks on adults
- 70 percent of attacks that result in fatalities
- 77 percent that result in maiming
And here is one more interesting fact about pit bulls: These dogs attack adults nearly as often as they attack children, a characteristic not found in any other breed. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), between the years 1979 and 1998 at least 25 breeds of dogs were involved in 238 human dog bite related fatalities. Pit bulls and rottweilers were involved in more than half of these fatalities – about 60 percent.
A number of these dog attacks occur partly because dog owners are not responsible. But they also occur because these are dogs with the tendency to attack. Numbers do not lie. We need sound legislation in our cities, stringent requirements for owners who choose to keep these breeds of dogs and a definite requirement for them to carry liability insurance so that the dog bite victim is not hit again by having to pay huge medical bills to get appropriate treatment.