UPDATE - Police say they issued two citations to the owner of a pit bull that killed a five year old boy, but no charges will be brought against the man whose identity is being protected.
UPDATE - Chicago Animal Care and Control is once again refusing to acknowledge a pit bull that launched a fatal attack is a pit bull.
"Brad Powers, a spokesman for the Commission on Animal Care and Control, said the dog was "large and muscular."
"While we have no way to confirm a dog breed based on physical characteristics alone, the animal has features consistent with the Dogo Argentino breed," he said in an email."
People can identify pit bulls by physical appearance. That obvious fact has been upheld by court decisions.
Powers' other statement is true, however, because every single pit bull does, in fact, have features consistent with the Dogo Argentino breed because pit bulls and other related gripping dog breeds were all foundation stock for the development of Dogo Argentinos which were developed for the exact same purposes as pit bulls and all gripping dogs - dog fighting and "hunting" by attacking large game. See this link and this link for more about Dogos and their relationship to pit bulls.
Thankfully, the dangerous gripping breed Dogo Argentino is still fairly scarce in the United States. On two pages of Dogo Argentino Breeder websites, no puppies were available immediately and all were being bred as catch dogs for hog dogging. On BYB breeder sites, there was one single Dogo puppy listed for $1800. The rest of the Dogo puppies were listed for between $2400 and $3300.
So, the expert handlers at CACC looked at a white (and some say white and brown) pit bull, with supposedly no other information, and jumped to the conclusion that instead of a pit bull mix, they were looking at different, rare, expensive, related pit fighting/big game hunting dog.
This is not the first time that CACC has tried to hide the pit bull. In 2010, after Johnny Wilson was killed by his daughter's 6 pit bulls, then director Cherie Travis contended that the killer dogs were completely unidentifiable mixed breeds.
It is downright frightening that CACC persists in misleading the public in order to protect pit bulls.
UPDATE - An autopsy on Tuesday found James W. Nevils III died of multiple sharp and blunt force injuries to his head and his neck. His death was ruled an accident.
Chicago - A 5 year old boy, James W. Nevils III, was fatally attacked by a pit bull according to witnesses. The pit bull had the boy by the throat and was shaking him around. Neighbors came and beat, bludegeoned and stabbed the pit bull to death with a brick, pole and knife to get it to stop the attack.
RIP sweet boy |
“They were trying to drag it out of the house, I guess so people could help. So my brother went across the street to get a chair to get the dog off the baby but it didn’t work.”
Witnesses reported that seeing this lifeless boy was the worst thing they'd ever seen.
The dog owner, the victim's adult cousin, was not there when the attack happened. He returned home after James was taken to the hospital.
Neighbor Lamar Lewis said, "All I heard was, 'Why y'all let the dog out?' Because he knew what kind of dog he had. So them letting the dog out, he knew what was possible to happen."
Several outlets are reporting this, including a couple local and one national outlet. All but the Tribune and Fox news have mentioned that witnesses had seen the dog around the neighborhood, were familiar with it, and identified it as a pit bull.
Read more:
Chicago Tribune
ABC News
CBS Chicago
ABC Houston
ABC Chicago
ABC News
Chicago Sun Times
CLTV
Chicago Tribune
Fox News Chicago
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