For those new to the blog, my follow-up Friday provides me with an opportunity to update or revise a post from the previous week.

You know sometimes you post about something and you need an update but it doesn’t warrant a whole blog.  Or sometimes someone made a comment that really resonated with you.  Yup, Follow-Up Friday baby! 🙂

I really only want to follow-up with Justice For Putz.

People have different ideas about whether dogs are supposed to provide protection or not.  Personally I don’t want my dog putting him/herself in harm’s way for me.   My dogs are like my children and I would protect my children with my life.  I try really hard to let my dogs know that I can take care of myself and in turn take care of them.  That is the reason we train with other people and dogs as frequently as we can.

But I can’t get inside my dog’s mind to know what they are thinking and I can’t predict with 100% accuracy how my dog will react in any given situation.  I’d like to think neither one of my dogs would EVER bite, but they are dogs and I don’t know.  Which is why we take precautions with our dogs around other people, especially children.    We also try and educate other people about how to treat our dogs.

I find it sad that because a dog bites, it is immediately the dog’s fault.  My aunt and uncle had a dog once, Scooter who jumped their fence and bit a child.  I don’t know all of the reasonings for their decision (if the law was involved or not) but they decided to euthanize Scooter.  It broke my heart when I found out, because Scooter was a great dog.

After Scooter had been put down, my aunt and uncle found out that the child who had been bitten had been using a sling shot and shooting marbles at Scooter.  One day Scooter had enough and stuck up for himself and he lost his life because of it.

Sadly Scooter and Putz aren’t the only stories about dog’s being wrongfully euthanized.

I wonder if Putz had been a Labrador or a different breed of dog if the outcome would have been the same?  2 Brown Dawgs left a comment about another pitbull who did nothing, and was still euthanized.

It concerns me, because right now the focus is on pitbulls, because a certain population of people have used the dogs wrongly.  But that focus can change.  When I was a kid I remember my father telling me how vicious Doberman Pinschers were, German Shepherds were also considered a “dangerous” breed, but we all know that isn’t the case.

We need to take action now and stop this breed specific crusade, because if we don’t we can’t be sure it won’t be our dog’s breed that’s next.

Book update, my book has 6,231 words.