It's also about renewing the ban on pit bulls in Cincinnati and making laws tougher for owners of dangerous dogs. Christopher Smitherman, Cincinnati City Council's Law and Public Safety Committee chairman, is "wrestling with" proposing those changes.
The biting dog in this story is a pit bull. That bred-to-fight breed has been in the news since June 4, when two pit bulls savagely mauled the face of a 6-year-old Westwood girl, Zainabou Drame.
Before the animals were killed by police, they tore at her face and severed her tongue. It cannot be reattached.
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| Bebe Wilker and her dog, Bartles, rest on the deck of her home in East Price Hill. The Enquirer/Gary Landers |
Problems with dangerous dogs in general – and pit bulls in particular – are not restricted to certain neighborhoods in Cincinnati. Nor are they common to one part of the country. Every community struggles with the problem, in part, Smitherman believes, because some owners of these dogs appreciate and encourage the traits that can make the animals so dangerous.
In this dog bites dog story, the bitten dog survived to bark again. His owner wants to tell his story.
Bebe Wilker shivered in her river-view home as she recalled taking Bartles – her Jack Russell-Westie terrier mix – for his afternoon walk three Saturdays ago. They followed their usual route through East Price Hill's up-and-coming, gentrificationally inclined Incline District.
Wilker is very protective of Bartles. He weighs 14 pounds and is a rescue dog. His previous owners abandoned him before Wilker adopted him two years ago.
As they walked, they passed a line of 19th-century row houses on Mount Hope Avenue. Without warning, a 55-pound pit bull shot through an open gate. Leaving behind a tiny, fenced-in yard in front of a red-brick row house, the dog attacked Bartles on the sidewalk.
The attacker quickly sank its fangs into the back of Bartles' neck. "Then it started shaking him back and forth," Wilker said. That's a customary canine maneuver intended to snap necks and kill opponents.
Daphne Smith witnessed the attack. She was on the grounds of the house where the pit bull lives. The dog remains at SPCA Cincinnati.
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| Daphne Smith |
Smith pleaded not guilty June 27 to charges of not properly confining a dangerous dog. If found guilty of the second-degree misdemeanor, she could be fined $750 and sentenced to 90 days in jail.
"All she did was stand on the house's front step and scream that it was not her dog," Wilker recalled.
Wilker screamed, too. Only she cried out for help. Then she launched a counterattack. She tried kicking the pit bull. That did no good.
"Then I tried to open the pit bull's jaws," she said. She lost her right thumbnail in the process.
"I know trying to open a pit bull's jaws sounds crazy," she added, "but I went on autopilot. When I got Bartles, I promised that, after all he's been through, I'd always take care of him."
In the end, she did. She picked up a plastic slide from a child-size wading pool in the house's front yard and whacked the pit bull on the back. The slide and the pool remain in the row house's front yard. Bartles' blood still stains the sidewalk. And another pit bull resides inside that row house.
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| The Mount Hope Ave home where the attack happened. The pit bull was not leashed and the gate was open. |
After separating the pit bull from Bartles, Wilker scooped up her dog and located her husband at church. They rushed their bloodied pet across town to the veterinarian.
Bartles spent 10 hours in surgery and recovery and has since returned home. Bite marks from the pit bull's jaws are clearly visible on the back of his neck. "Bartles still has no use of his right front leg," Wilker said. He walks on three paws and "falls down a lot. It just makes me sick."
Wilker knows Bartles' wounds cannot compare to the injuries Zainabou Drame suffered.
"I can't stop thinking about what that little girl is going through," Wilker said. The victim recently emerged from a medically induced coma and faces years of reconstructive surgery and counseling.
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| Bartles recovering from the pit bull attack |
"This incident with Bartles won't stop redevelopment from going on in the Incline District," Wilker said. Her neighborhood's Victorian-era housing stock and breathtaking views of the skylines, hills and riverfronts of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky make it a hot commodity. She still has "high hopes" for the Incline District.
"But something," she said, petting Bartles, "has to change in the city with pit bulls. They can't keep hurting people. The city shouldn't wait to do something until someone dies from an attack."
Those changes could only come from legislation that must be introduced in Councilman Smitherman's Law and Public Safety Committee. "There's something inside of me that's saying we need to look at this," Smitherman said.
That internal voice spoke up after the attacks on Zainabou Drame and Bartles the terrier. Since then, Smitherman discussed pit bulls and revising the vicious dog ordinance with Terrance Nestor, Cincinnati's interim city solicitor, and Charles Rubenstein, city prosecutor.
"This is not an easy subject to tackle," Smitherman noted. "The breed of pit bulls is vast and not as easy to define as the public thinks."
He pointed to evidence the city's lawyers gave him about Cincinnati's repealed pit bull ban. "When the law was on the books, nobody registered their dog," Smitherman said. "No one put a chip in their dog." In effect, "no one complied with the law." That's one reason he voted to repeal it.
[That's like saying there should be no speed limits b/c "everyone speeds". Or, there should be no laws against drinking and driving b/c there are so many people, who despite the current laws, still drink and then drive.]
The ban did not stop Cincinnatians from owning pit bulls. And it did not stop dogs of that breed from being a problem.
Fifty percent of the dogs in the kennels at SPCA Cincinnati belong to the pit bull family. That's up 10 percent from June 11. Those dogs are routinely put up for adoption, and they do find takers.
Explaining the 10 percent increase, Mike Retzlaff, SPCA's director of operations, said: "This is our busy time of the year. In the summer, people don't take care of their dogs."
That jibes with Smitherman's way of thinking. "The dogs aren't the issue," he said. "The owner is."
All dogs, he said, "can be trained to be vicious. That makes me cautious about banning an entire breed."
He discussed with the city's attorneys "making this more of a civil issue" and "raising fines to, say, $5,000" and "trying to bring accountability to the owners."
Smitherman intends to "wrestle with this throughout the summer and wrestle with our attorneys to come up with something that works." Before he introduces any legislation – the Law and Public Safety Committee's next meeting is Aug. 4 – Smitherman wants "to make sure that it doesn't create unintended consequences for innocent Cincinnatians."
He knows some Queen City residents are not so innocent. "People use these dogs to protect their illegal behavior," he said. "So, if the dog can be identified as a weapon, maybe we can get a harsher offense."
Then he related what the prosecutor told him. "If the owner can be charged with having, for example, illegal drugs and guns on the premises," he said, "that's worse than having a vicious dog."
That's easy for city officials to say. They're not Bartles the dog or 6-year-old Zainabou Drame.
End to NKY ban?
The Fort Thomas City Council safety committee will meet at 5:30 p.m. Monday for a second time to discuss repealing the city's 26-year-old ban on pit bulls. The meeting is in council chambers, 130 N. Fort Thomas Ave.
At council meetings, residents and nonresidents have asked for the law to be repealed, but outside meetings, others have expressed concern about repealing the ban, committee Chairman Tom Lampe said.
(Cincinnati.com - July 7, 2014)
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