March 5th, 2010 by Editor

The Courier-News today has an interesting piece.  Wag the dog indeed!:

Bow, wow, wow – wag the dog

Elgin Mayor Ed Schock owns a German shepherd, while Councilman Robert Gilliam once owned a Doberman pinscher. Why this might make some folks go bow-wow-wow is that Schock and Gilliam are proponents of amending Elgin’s animal control ordinance to include strict breed-specific restrictions on pit bulls.

Thing is, through the decades, shepherds and pinschers have had image problems of their own. According to Karen Delise, author of “The Pit Bull Placebo,” in 1928, the Australian government imposed one of the first official breed bans on German shepherds — a ban that stayed in effect until 1974.

Delise writes that Dobermans, which were used by the Nazis as well as U.S. Marines during World War II, reached the height of their fame/infamy in the 1970s with popular culture portraying them as the archetypical vicious dogs.

For a hilarious caricature of Mayor Ed Schock, click through to the Courier-News here.

For more about the Elgin City Council’s astounding hypocrisy, click here.