ILLINOIS -- There was no grace period for Mason County Animal Control Officer Joe Ragle to get acclimated to the job when he was appointed in January. Greeting him on day one was a pit bull trapped in a garage after turning on its owners.
According to Ragle, the dog had tried to smother the Manito family’s infant by lying on it. The dog refused to move and the family, with the baby trapped beneath the massive dog, had to hit the dog with sticks to get it to move off the infant. They got the dog into the garage and closed the door, trapping the pit bull until Ragle showed up.
His first day on the job and Ragle had to deal with a possibly angry pit bull somewhere behind a closed garage door.
‘It was just, ‘Hey, it’s there. Go get it,’” Ragle said.
That incident was the most serious one out of a handful of incidents in which a pit bull has turned on its owners that Ragle has already had to deal with in his two months on the job. Nobody was injured in that first incident, nor in the three subsequent, similar incidents involving pit bulls in the county, Ragle said Tuesday after the Mason County Board meeting, but the margin for error with a dog so muscular as the pit bull is slim.
Pit bulls as a breed are often stereotyped as vicious, dangerous dogs, which many advocacy groups think is unfair. Ragle said he agrees that the dogs can be the most loving and loyal of pets, but there seems to be a culture in Mason County of raising the dogs specifically to serve as guard dogs to provide security to homes. And when new children are added to the family, the dogs might not react too well, he added.
“People who have it for protection in their house, they’re just trying to have protection but they’re going about it the wrong way,” Ragle said.
Ragle said in a report to the County Board that he has not had any incidents in which anybody has been seriously hurt but that possibility is there, as evidenced by the January incident in Bloomington in which a 4-year-old girl was killed by one of her family’s pit bulls. According to Ragle, there are a lot more pit bulls in the county than he realized before he took the job, and he hopes dog owners remain mindful of how powerful the dogs can be.
In his two months on the job, Ragle said he has had seven or eight different incidents where a dog has turned on him and he has figured out a couple tricks to handling the situation. For one, he always carries his clipboard in one hand so he can stick it in a dog’s mouth when it comes at him.
“What I’ve found works pretty good is the Taser, but the red-dot laser on the Taser,” Ragle said. “For some reason when you turn that on that red dot hits the ground (and) those dogs instantly go into play mode. They want to chase that laser around, so I’ll take it. Whatever. I’ll turn that on and they go after that laser, I’ll take them right down the driveway with that laser.
“I haven’t had to tase one, yet, thankfully, but I’ve been close.”
(Pekin Daily Times - Mar 13, 2014)
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