Killer dogs in the land of the weird

On the heels of last weeks’ column about the Saipan boonie dog situation, a not-so-funny story floated our way from California. An apartment dweller in the San Francisco area was mauled to death by a neighbor’s two monster dogs. The victim had merely been fumbling with her door lock in an attempt to get inside her own home.

Attack dogs come in two varieties. Some–and the ones we usually read about–are results of trashy people training animals to do not-so-nice things. I saw this first hand in the seedier parts of the Chicago area, where the welfare and ghetto set–the Clinton constituency–enjoyed fighting its dogs almost as it enjoyed drinking malt liquor.

From all accounts, the human trash factor is evident in the San Francisco event, where a supposed cabal of some kind of skinhead biker freak jailbird types had turned some pooches into nasty critters.

Hey, trash is trash, no matter what side of the tracks it lives on.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg on this note. Moving from the human garbage can to the dry rot of suburbia, the other breed of attack dogs is rooted in California’s politically correct suburban set. The poor woofers are often cramped up in tiny condos, and in sun-heated cars in parking lots, by women wanting “protection.” The women are fit only for the company of California’s ranks of gelded male office dweebs, so, if any testosterone is to be employed for the safety of home and hearth, it must be provided by four-legged beasts.

Nobody seems to much care about how the dogs feel about this. I’m no Doctor Doolittle, but I do believe that nature had other plans for animals other than being caged up for the benefit of ugly white liberal women in the suburbs. The prohibition they pursue against the rest of us to be able to defend our humble homes is cited in their shrill and whining blather about “morality,” but their cruel treatment of defenseless critters seems to be an issue not worth discussing.

Go figure.

In all cases, though, I’m for the owner of a dog being held accountable for what the pooch does. It just seems fair. I suppose there are cases where a dog inexplicitly flips out and goes on a violent bender; I dunno how such aberrations should be treated. But I’ll bet you that nine times out of 10, one of these “dog bites man” (or, in this case, “woman”) stories, you’ve got a clear cut case of an owner who needs to spend some time in the hoosegow reflecting on the concept of responsibility.

But California is a strange place and we don’t know what, if anything, will happen. We’ll probably need doggie psychiatrists to counsel everyone concerned. They’ll need a doggie “Proposition” on the ballet to allow the whining mob out there to snivel about something new (sniveling is California’s leading export). Not that it will help the dogs, of course.

So here we have another case of Saipan having a small problem (boonie dogs), but the United States having a much larger one (killer dogs). Our lack of total order is a heck of a lot better than their Orwellian strain of it, and their resulting societal sickness.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”