Trained to kill

>> The transformation of dogs into weapons is cruel, inhumane and dangerous to humans, critics charge

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photos by JASON FELKER

Every spring Dr. Ken Shaw waits for the victims of man’s best friend to be rushed to the emergency room at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. Last year’s crop included a five-year-old West Island child who was sent for emergency lifesaving surgery after his aunt and uncle’s Rottweiler and Dobermann tore up his face and neck while his twin sister watched helplessly. “His airway was already swelling when he got here, so we could only fit a neonate-sized tube into his airway. We had to open his neck or he would have died,” says Shaw, a pediatric surgeon.

The boy, one of 60 dog bite victims treated by the hospital last year, suffered cuts requiring 10 metres of sutures and spent four days in intensive care. But the worst scars might have been left on his sister who watched as the family pets attacked. “Since then she’s started having tantrums and needing more support,” says Shaw, who notes that the attack dogs are still frolicking on the West Island. “The dogs weren’t sacrificed or euthanized or given away, so you can imagine what kind of family relations are going on.”

The child was another statistic in the unspoken epidemic of dog attacks. According to the coroner’s office, which investigated and released a report on dog attacks in 1999, 117,000 Quebecers reported having been bitten by a dog in 1997.

The typical canine attack has been profiled repeatedly: the victim is often under five years old—in fact, three of four victims are under 10. Most dogs belong to the family or friends, the attack is usually the dog’s first and victims most often suffer bites to the face and neck. There’s also some indication that dog attacks are becoming more serious. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American canine population increased by two per cent between 1986 and 1996, but the percentage of bites requiring medical attention rose almost tenfold during that same period.

Laying the blame

Some, like Pierre Barnoti, executive director of the SPCA, feel that the cult of the aggressive dog is a public nuisance propelled by dog training profiteers who endanger the population by teaching dogs to become vicious attack animals. The Montreal SPCA receives 33,000 animals a year, and between 2,500 to 3,000 of those are aggressive dogs, according to Barnoti. Most of them are euthanized at the centre. Barnoti wants the roughly 20 schools in and around Montreal more closely monitored and, if they persist in aggressivity training, closed. “We have a lot of people bringing us dogs that they sent to a school for aggressivity training, and then are fearful of the dog. They decide the tension of living with a dog that could become vicious at any time is too much,” he says. “Why do you think we’ll never be a no-kill shelter? We get a lot of aggressive killer dogs. They’re past the point of absorbing instruction, and trying to deprogram them is a very lengthy operation. Some people claim that they’re experts in doing so, but I’d venture to say that to take an aggressive dog and deprogram him, the owners remain with that fear.”

Barnoti claims that dog trainers often use inhumane methods to train the dogs. “They’ll never admit that the dog is trained to become aggressive by offending, hurting or scaring him, but the main reason for a dog to become aggressive is fear. I’ve heard all kinds of stories of dogs being kept for a week to be trained as an aggressive dog or guard dog. For four or five days the trainers won’t do anything and then the last two they’ll scare the daylights out of him and make him become aggressive. They train your dog, then you realize three months later that your dog might kill your children.”

Authorities have also done little to help with the problem, says Barnoti, who decries municipal bylaws passed throughout the province that have vilified particular breeds. “You can’t start forbidding one breed of dog, because first you’ll ban the pit bull, then it will be the Rottweiler and then the German shepherd. Of the 117,000 bites suffered by Quebecers in a year, I’m willing to bet my next paycheque that pit bull attacks are far and few between.”
Barnoti is a vocal critic of practices of our former city administration. “I’ve seen pit bulls send citizens to a hospital with a kneecap gone and the City of Montreal turns around and gives its owner a tap on the hand. But I’ve also seen situations where a dog gets in a fight with another dog to instinctively establish dominance, and the city storms the house, seizes and kills the dog,” says Barnoti.

The problem, he feels, is owners who believe that dogs can be used as a mobile, toothy method of personal protection. “You’re not allowed to carry a weapon, so a lot of people are turning to the animal to become a weapon. It’s totally crazy. If the dog attacks somebody the injury he’s going to inflict on somebody far surpasses the crime,” he says. He has called on the provincial Minister of Agriculture to outlaw aggressivity and guard training. He also wants the rental of such animals forbidden. A ministry rep tells the Mirror that they aren’t considering any such ban.

Weapon or companion?

But it’s not hard to find a dog trainer to disagree with Barnoti’s point of view. “I find that hard to believe, that a dog owner would pay a fortune to get that dog trained that way, and then dump it at the SPCA,” says Joe Rosen, of J.R.’s Dog Training. “If my dog was being trained to be psycho and I didn’t want it that way, I’d put a stop to it. I’ve never had one dog turn out to be psycho.” The 23-year veteran dog trainer reports that only “one half of one per cent” of his clients seek to make their dogs more aggressive.

Barnoti feels even that’s too many. “A dog should be a companion animal period. It shouldn’t be a weapon,” says Barnoti. “God knows, in 2002 there’s enough electronics and alarms to protect you. You don’t need a dog to be a killer.” The SPCA, he notes, refuses any request to adopt an animal intended for the purposes of attack or defence.

Rosen, however, considers it justified to transform a family dog into a means of protection. “If somebody wants protection because they were broken into, they can apply for a gun permit, but they won’t get it unless you tell them you want it to join a gun club or something. If somebody wants protection because their insurance won’t cover them anymore, why shouldn’t they have that right?” asks Rosen.

“What about a woman who has been raped once and is afraid to be raped a second time? An alarm won’t stop a criminal, they just cut it and go inside,” says Rosen, who also opposes a longstanding proposal to ban certain breeds of dogs in Montreal. “It’s like suggesting that kitchen knives be banned. Anyway, if they ban pit bulls, you could say, ‘This ain’t a pit bull, it’s a Labrador-boxer mix.’ What will they do, check its DNA?”

No more terror training

For around $600 a month anybody can rent a guard dog to protect property. These dogs, many of which have had their vocal cords removed so their barking won’t irritate neighbours, are trained to guard fenced-off commercial areas such as lumberyards or car dealerships. Traditionally they have been trained through the terror of having their cage rattled at random moments. The SPCA’s Barnoti says that these dogs sometimes escape onto city streets. “A woman found one of these dogs roaming the streets and brought him here. The owners came with three men and chains and bars to collect the dog.”

But Stephane Legacé of Lamarche and Pinard, an East-End dog trainer and supplier of guard dogs, says that the days developing guard dogs through fear are gone. “We build up their confidence with positive reinforcement,” he says, resulting in an animal that can be more effective than an expensive video surveillance system. “A thief will rob a place with an alarm rather than a place with a guard dog, because with an alarm he has a few minutes before the police arrive. If there’s a dog there, it’ll just defend his territory.”

Legacé says trained dogs are safe. “A dog that’s trained is a lot less dangerous than an untrained dog. Such a dog will only react to the orders of his master and in the cases of a dog guarding a yard, the animal will know only to be aggressive within the yard,” he says. “But if a dog is badly trained, it can be dangerous.”

But not all dog trainers embrace the notion of training dogs to protect families. Local dog trainer Gaby Popper, for one, refuses all requests for aggressivity or protection training. “We don’t do it. I can teach a dog to be aggressive, but every time he makes an error somebody will get hurt. It’s the error factor. Let’s put it this way: I’m a bright guy, I know to stop at red lights, but once a year I don’t. A guard dog is less intelligent. He’ll make even more mistakes.”

Popper also questions the usefulness of training dogs to attack on cue. “In real life you invite me into your house and offer me a cup of coffee and I quietly take a gun out of my breast pocket. Your dog will sleep right through it. It’s a fallacy that you can train a dog for any and all situations,” says Popper.

Popper believes that most dog attacks are the result of bad training. “They’re acting aggressive but their motivation is fear. They’re sold very young, during their formative stage, to people who don’t know what they’re doing. The more insecure dogs we have, the more random dog attacks we’ll get,” says Popper. “The public should be warned: 20 per cent of dogs bite. I don’t care if you tell me that your dog doesn’t bite, I know that statistical odds are that your dog is 20 per cent ready to bite,” he says.

Haunting memories

Meanwhile, back at the Ste-Justine Hospital, emergency room nurse Estelle Roberge reports that the outdoor dog bite season is already off to a lousy start, with seven young children having been treated at the hospital for serious canine attacks this year.
Roberge, who has been leading an information campaign on the threat of dog attacks for several years, remembers with horror an event from last year. “A six year old was bitten by his Rottweiler and had his face ripped half off. He stayed here for a long time and needed plastic surgery. The dog had already bitten the kid in the past,” she says. She says that the damage a dog can inflict includes the haunting that stays long after the wounds have healed. “Often the most disagreeable part is the psychological mark that’s left. That little boy is recovering physically but he’ll have to be followed psychologically and avoid all contact with dogs. It’s sad to see these traumatized children be terrified and have to cross the street every time they see a dog on the sidewalk.”

Roberge cites a link between poverty and the dog attacks that force 1,700 Quebecers into hospital each year. “The worst cases come from single parents and poor families with social problems,” she says, blaming a lack of parental supervision as a particular problem. Like Barnoti, Roberge has called for change: she particularly wants dog runs to be kept at a distance from areas where children play, but, like Barnoti, her appeals to the authorities have failed.

Perhaps luckily, the worst case Roberge knows of is the one she didn’t see, that of a five-year-old girl being mauled to death five years ago in Sainte-Tite-des-Caps after she approached a pack of underfed huskies kept tied on a rope. “When dogs aren’t fed, they become wolves,” says Roberge. “Many dog owners try to turn big guard dogs into little salon lap-dogs, but in their genetic memory they’re still dogs.” :