Within the past two weeks three causes, additional to the multitude theretofore existing, have been assigned in favor of the passage of an act prohibitory of the keeping of bulldogs in any populous district.
In Chicago an engaging child of some three summers was mangled by one of these brutes. She was walking on the street, the animal was led on a leash by a young man, but in the unprovoked ferocity that is characteristic of its race it sprang forward and seized and mangled the infant. Had the attack been made in a solitary neighborhood it is probably that the girl would have been killed, as the boy whose fate we presenty shall narrate was killed. The child was saved from more serious injury by the aid of passers by.
A day or two ago, and in the civilization of Chicago, a fellow infinitely more brutal than the low-grade beasts that he owned, first knocked his wife down, and then set his two bulldogs on her. The poor woman was nearly worried to death before strangers arrived and rescued her from the jaws of the brutes. It is just such fellows as this wife-beater that delight in the company of bulldogs. We do not mean to say that every one who keeps a bulldog is himself a brute; but, as Horace Greeley said, while all Democrats of his day were not horse-thieves, all the horse-thieves were Democrats, so we may say that while not every keeper of a bulldog is brutal, every brutal man delights in the cruel ferocity of bulldogs.
In Racine a 7-year-old boy, returning peacefully from school, was attacked and killed by two bulldogs. When the corpse was found, some hours after the murder, both ears were torn off, one arm devoured, the scalp frightfully lacerated, and an eye scratched out. The bulldogs were tracked to a neighboring barn and found licking their bloody jaws.
There is no rational excuse for the maintenance of such canine monstrosities in any populous district. They are as dangerous as dynamite or smallpox or any other of the minatory things that the police power of municipalities is evoked to repress and eliminate. An ordinance prohibitive of such animals within the city limits is well worthy of the consideration of the council
Daily Inter Ocean, Chicago IL
Read about the awful death of Harry Acklam in Racine Wisconsin that is referred to in this editorial on dogsbite.org:
The story of Harry Acklam, Murdered by Two Pit Bulls in 1896
