oh, lord!
this story made my heart stop!
i couldn't imagine how i would have felt if this had happened to annalisse!

Yeah. I actually wasn't thinking it as violence when I first read it. Not sure what in my mind made me switch over to think it was. I just figured either the dog saw the baby as his property or just thought it'd be another fun item to add to the backyard collection.

But still, I couldn't live with that dog anymore no matter what his mindset was. It'd just be too heart breaking, I think.

This really is a sad story: I've heard a lot about it on our local news.

The baby was born three weeks prematurely and had just been released from the hospital. Because he was premature, the parents hadn't gotten the nursery ready yet. The parents had left the nursery door open because they didn't yet have a monitor. In fact, the dad had just put the baby down and was getting ready to go get a monitor when the mom discovered the crib was empty.

Poor AJ has multiple skull fractures, a punctured lung and more than one broken rib. The initial report was that Dakota had taken the baby out of the crib to play with him, but some people are now speculating that Dakota was just trying to mother him.

I don't blame the dog, and I don't think the parents do, either. After the story broke, several people - from across the country - volunteered to adopt Dakota. She has never demonstrated violent behavior before.

It's just so sad. I can't imagine what this poor family is going through.

I posted this before, but a couple of weeks ago there was a dog owner who hadn't brought his dog in to see a vet in 9 years, and the dog was 10 years old. Not only did it bother me that he didn't care about his dog's health, but the fact that he didn't even know he could be slapped with a $250.00 fine for not bringing his dog in to get his shots. I'm not sure what it is in other states, but it's $250.00 here. If you're too irresponsible to have a pet then don't have one at all. Seriously.

What was this guy like? I ask because I think some people have fundamentally different attitudes about animals and pets, and it's not simply irresponsibility exactly.

For example, I think, that sometimes farmers have more of a utilitarian attitude about animals and since they also might have a lot of land and little chance of contract between their animals and other people or pets, they don't really think about rules and laws that say suburban pet owners are kind of consumed with.

I think this is especially likely to be true of old people.

Oh, I agree about how it would be heartbreaking, and that's why I have mixed feelings about criminal charges against parents, even in cases worse than this one in terms of "what were you thinking?/maybe neglect." On some level, if you're a person with normal emotional development, living knowing that your baby was hurt because you were an idiot is probably worse than what the criminal justice system could dish out.

I'm also hesitant to blame dogs or the owners of dogs who attack people who enter other people's yards without the dog owners knowledge or permission. We had some cases in Georgia where unsupervised children got badly mauled by dogs that the kids essentially had no business fooling with. I tend to blame the person who should have been watching the kid more than the people who fenced in their dog.

And THIS is why you give away your dog when you have a baby... Some people just shouldn't be parents.

I don't think you have to give your dog away. But you have to be careful about the dog and the baby.

And all dogs are different. I know a good number of dogs who love their new baby companions. Of course, though, they're never left alone. It's like putting a blanket over a time bomb--stupid.

Exactly! It kills me that some people give their pets away just because the woman is pregnant or a new baby is coming (a lot of cats wind up in shelters this way)

You just don't leave an animal alone with the kid
These dumb assed parents should be banned from breeding :rolleyes:

Can't they give dogs like this some kind of meds to mellow it out or something? I've heard of some people doing that.

I'm not sure what he was like. I guess you could say he was in his fifties. He just kept complaining about the cost. We quoted him $655.00 just to look at the dog, and he freaked over that. I mean, if he would have been taking the dog in for regular check ups, he wouldn't see anything near that amount of money. I blame the owners most of the time, because it's not like the animal can take him/herself to the vet. I agree, people do have different attitudes about pets, it's when they have a "I don't care" attitude that bothers me. He just kept mentioning the cost. 9 times out of 10 he'll be back to have the dog put down. That dog was in terrible shape.



And this is why you shouldn't own a dog to begin with.

I've seen owners who think psychiatric drugs for dogs are borderline animal abuse, and I've also seen others who think it's the ultimate cure for behavior problems. It just seems to provoke a strong response from owners, regardless. Really, there isn't a "magic let's make it go away pill" for behavior problems in dogs. It's just that resolving a behavior problem requires behavior modification, not just only for the dog but for the owner too. I mean, there are certain psychiatric drugs that can help some dogs with some behavior problems, but there isn't a drug that can work a miracle cure on its own, and that's what a lot of owners don't understand.

In the end, as someone said before, a dog is doing what nature intended...therefore I disagree with medicating a dog for it to 'mellow out'.

I'm sorry for the dog. At my vet, they have you fill out paperwork when you first take in the dog that let's them get a feel for the kind of treatment options you'll be looking at. I think one of my choices for one question had the option of "my pet is member of the family and I would like to know about the best treatments, regardless of cost." But there were other options, and this guy apparently would have check whatever was at the other extreme.

There's no excuse for letting your animal get to the point when it is suffering because of lack of care, but I'd be wary of normalizing the "spare no expense" model of vet care too.
I'm not saying you are and you were there and I wasn't, but for some people $655 is more than a house payment or rent for the month, and they really need to think about whether the pet is the right thing to spend it on. But again, he could have been taking care of the dog all along for a lot less money.

It truly sounded to me that the dog treated the baby like a puppy. A dog doesn't carry it's prey by the neck, it carries it's puppies by the neck. A dog kills and eats it's prey right then and there. If that dog was trying to harm that baby, that baby wouldn't have lived.