MASSACHUSETTS -- The victim of a vicious attacking pit bull that escaped from a neighbor’s home said Gov. Deval Patrick would never have approved a new state law yanking the teeth from municipal controls on the threatening breed if he’d been the target of the charging beast as she was.
“He’d want the ordinances,” said Madeline Thurlow of Norton. “I think the governor should want people to be safe. I think there should be restrictions on pit bulls.”
Thurlow and a friend were out for an evening walk in April 2008 when a neighbor’s pit bull got loose and terrorized the two women, biting each on their arms and legs.
“The thing just kept coming at us,” she said. “He’d come at me, then he’d attack at her. I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re terribly frightening.”
Thurlow said she suffered puncture wounds to her hands and legs and spent a week in Brigham and Women’s Hospital on heavy antibiotics to ward off infection after surgery on her hands. She said at one point she was told she may lose a finger.
Thurlow said she wishes she could have talked to the governor before the bill crossed his desk.
“I’d tell him there should be specific laws in place for pit bulls,” she said. “My own doctor, he doesn’t think it’s the pit bulls. He thinks it’s the owners. I don’t know. I just know that they’re scary.”
(Boston Herald - August 23, 2012)
