so i saw this while i was lurking around care2.com...and it made me really sad




When puppies become 'bait'

Mar. 29, 2007 12:00 AM

We once thought that intentional cruelty to animals could not get much worse than throwing two tormented beasts into a pit, making them fight to the bloody death.
How naive. The bitter, felonious "sport" of dog-fighting - a crime that thrives in this Valley - is but the cruel main event. Dogs must be trained to fight. And for that, the owners need "bait dogs."
Long before the salacious crowds gather for their bloodsport, the animals must learn to use their teeth and claws to rip and tear at other dogs. They must hone their vicious skills.
In the parlance, the fight-dog owners must know if their animals "got game."

And, to train their killing dogs, they use what are known as bait dogs. Animals stolen from backyards or purchased as puppies through classified ads. Or, on rarer occasions, at shelters.

"We see the (bait dogs) come in every day," says Kim Noetzel of the Arizona Humane Society. The dogs, she said, all have the "tell-tale signs of having been fought." The missing sections of their hides. The shredded muzzles and the leg bones broken in two by the massive jaws of a fighting dog that had been set on the "bait." By an animal that already has "game."

The bait dogs are starved. They're beaten. They're made to make fury their natural condition, to attack on sight. But when they are put into a pit with a fighting dog, they are often chained. Often muzzled. And the fight dog is unleashed on them. For practice. They are bait.

What can be done to stave off this hideous, already-illegal form of netherworld entertainment? Perhaps not much more than authorities already are doing, unfortunately. But county animal-control officials are aware of the problem, at least. And, more tangentially, the Legislature is considering broadening the legal definition of dog-fighting to protect animals other than dogs.

The director of Maricopa County Animal Care and Control, Dr. Rodrigo Silva, and his staff are well familiar with the sort of people who seek out bait dogs. And they often turn away potential "rescuers" of impounded animals who they suspect may want them as bait dogs or fighting dogs.

People who lurk in the subterranean world of dog-fighting tend to avoid adopting pups from the county, he said, since they generally dislike government agencies knowing anything about them.

"These guys need a regular supply of bait dogs, so they don't want to be found in anyone's database," Silva says.

The Legislature, meanwhile, is considering expanding state prohibitions of "dog" fighting to include all forms of "animal" fighting.

Sick as it may sound, the dog-fighting crowd sometimes throws animals of other species into a pit with a fighting dog, apparently on the expectation that inter-species death matches are not precisely forbidden by law. House Bill 2610 would attempt to close that loophole.

Alas, no legislation likely can protect dogs from being stolen from yards or purchased as puppies from private owners by people who will use them as bait dogs. Sometimes, our best weapon against criminals such as fighting-dog owners is simple awareness. You don't have to sell your pups to someone you suspect may harm them.

No dog should live its life, however short, as bait.


why are people so mean?
:(

POOR PUPPY!!! T.T
» ikimashokie on 2007-04-02 05:54:21

I don't particularly like dogs but that's just.... that's just awful.....
» randomjunk on 2007-04-02 05:56:51

Seriously, can't someone actually blow up what they threaten to blow up??? It would make life a lot more interesting.

Well... I guess they do... Oh well.
» ikimashokie on 2007-04-02 06:03:58

My soul just sputtered a little bit there :(
So sad...

Honestly, I wouldn't mind having those people eliminated from the face of the earth. Sounds harsh, I know. But then you wonder what these people might have accomplished in life, what they might have contributed to society. In most cases, it's nothing. Except for pitting animals against each other and disfiguring puppies for "bait." Somebody smite those sons of bitches.
» The-Muffin-Man on 2007-04-02 06:14:23

Some people I know in the army used to make camel spiders fight scorpions while they were doing nothing in Iraq. But camel spiders are evil: they can chew through your army boot and then they numb your foot so you don't realize that they're there until they've eaten half your toe. And they're like as big as a plate. And everyone knows that scorpions are evil.

But yeah, I guess at least we don't have gladiator rings anymore, when people would do this same thing only to human beings....
» Zanzibar on 2007-04-02 07:32:49

That was from a dog fight?
» kKAma67 on 2007-04-02 08:26:02

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