For days, I have been reading headlines like “Woman Loses Limbs After Pit Bull Attack” and “Pit bull likely ate owner’s hands” after 65-year-old Anne Murray was brutally attacked by a so-called pit bull at her Wilton, Connecticut home on Monday morning, November 11, 2013. The dog was shot and killed by responding police.
But, while all this hysteria is blowing around, the truth and the mitigating circumstances have gotten lost. For instance, the headline indicating that the Wilton, Connecticut woman in question had her arms torn off is untrue. She had one arm severed and one hand severed, and maybe up to her elbow depending on which article you read, and it is believed, not proven, that the dog did eat her hands.
Now, what would cause a dog to engage in this type of behavior? The public will collectively conclude that it’s just pit bulls being pit bulls, and of course there’s the media ever ready to disparage a pit bull and say the attack was “without provocation” and offer a list of recent pit bull attacks that were also supposedly without provocation or that were as a result of a dog attacking its own owner. But what the media seldom ever reports is that there are always mitigating factors in dog attacks.
Indeed, the kind of extreme behavior exhibited by the so-called pit bull that attacked Anne Murray will almost certainly have an explanation that is likewise full of extremes. How do we know? Because no canine acts that way unless something extreme has been done to it, typically some kind of animal cruelty or even drug dosing. It is sad but true, but I have read articles before about dog fighters dosing their dogs with certain drugs to make the dog more aggressive. But does this make the dog bad, or the owner an animal abuser? Regardless, the dog paid with his life.
While initial reports had it that a “Wilton Woman [Was] Attacked by her Dog,” this is false. The dog was owned by one of her two sons who was living with her. Now why would a grown man be living with his mother other than for something like financial hardship? It makes me question what the son was into.
Murray’s son had been arrested several times before, and the police had been to the home twice before because the dog in question, Tux, had been free-roaming, though without incident. If the dog was as vicious as people are now claiming, wouldn’t he have attacked before now? Aggression tends to escalate, but this attack was out of the blue. It makes me wonder, given the son’s criminal activity, if, besides the possibility of the dog having been abused, if the dog wasn’t the target of some kind of criminal revenge.
For instance, could the dog have been given bath salts, a drug akin to amphetamines or cocaine, as some kind of retribution? We certainly know that humans who ingest this street drug have gone crazy and even eaten people’s faces. What if someone who had it out for the woman’s son dosed the dog with something? The dog was frequently free-roaming so anyone could have had access to him.
Regardless of what actually happened, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to explain away the dog’s behavior out of some vain attempt at a pit bull apologetic. But this story makes no sort of sense unless there is some kind of human intervention; it’s far too extreme.
So what’s going on here? The town of Wilton, Connecticut itself is an affluent city with home prices averaging $1 million. Yet Anne Murray and her sons live in a more rural location. The Houston Chronicle described the scene:
Range Road is in a neighborhood of tidy suburban homes, but the red house at number 77 has fallen on hard times. The garage door is mostly missing; a picket fence covers the opening. The electricity meter has a shut-off tag affixed to it.
On the front stoop is a large plastic tub, partially filled with water, into which a winter coat was draped. The front yard is covered in brambles and the mailbox hadn’t been emptied in days.
Clearly Anne Murray and her sons are having some kind of financial difficulty, which, if my hunch is correct, had something to do with the dog mauling, whether directly or indirectly.
The point is, there is more to the story than what we’re being told via the media or authorities, and so until we get some definitives, all we can do at this point is conjecture. Still, the media and the public should refrain from slamming the dog, or calling for a pit bull ban or some other form of breed-specific legislation (BSL), when it is clear the dog was not kept very well by his owner, and may very well have been a victim of abuse himself.
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Photo courtesy of Fox Connecticut and the NY Daily News.
5 responses to “Wilton, CT: So-Called Pit Bull Severs Arm, Hand of Woman; Hysteria Ensues”
Surely, this article is a joke. This woman is defending the Pit Bulls?
That is sick. A dog is an animal. they do things by instinct, they don’t think about it as humans are capable of doing. The Pit Bull reacts for whatever reason and when they do, damage can be extensive, as in being attacked by a lion. They are not meant to be pets and the SPCA shud be sued by every victim of this animal for passing them off as pets to unsuspecting victims all in the name of money. May God Forgive Them, because we victims certainly don’t.
Hmm, it’s curious that you know that I’m a woman. Most people who don’t know who I am tend to think I’m a man. But you somehow seem to know just exactly who I am. Curious that.
And did you really just say I think this is a joke? Yeah, like Sandyhook was a joke, right? Because in that case it was the gun’s fault that all those innocent children got murdered, right?
Just like in this case, and in like so very many cases of so-called “pit bull” attacks, this dog was most likely abused, and/or most likely dosed with something. We’ve seen this before. Dogs kept kenneled, constantly tethered, or who frequently free-roam make excellent targets for ill-intended people like radical animal rights activists who want to make a statement by poisoning some innocent animal. They could care less if a human being or an animal got horribly hurt or killed could they? So long as their agenda was served.
I absolutely have compassion for humans above all, which is why I know better than to blame the weapon rather than the wicked, depraved human who used it. That human could’ve been a drug dealer or bookie looking to exact revenge on someone who owed him money, or an animal rights activist looking to make a statement. After all, poison and dosing is their standard modus operandi.
A good investigator in this situation would conjecture just exactly as I have, that is, if an investigator were actually looking for the truth. That doesn’t make him or her sick; it makes them thorough.
So what’s the matter Rose? Did I get a little too close to the truth?
Is this a joke? The horrible excuses made for this dog, this stated Pit Bull, are smelling of Unicorns and falling coconuts. Seldom have I read such peculiar and disorganised thinking made words. Utterly bizarre. Why grasp onto ‘bath salts’? Why not blame the position of the moon in the sky? Why not wonder if the distant sound of a lonely owl caused such a catastrophic attack? Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings on the banks of the Nile? Is there NOTHING that you will not attempt, in order to divert from the cold, plain truth? Pit Bull, woman, amputated her arm and one half, ate some of the flesh. Sounds about right to anyone who knows what these Bulldogs are capable of, and frequently DO. Please, there is grasping at straws, and then there is THIS. It is so tragic it borders on comedy. This will run and run, this disorganised mess of thought-patterns of yours. I suspect many Pit owners and supporters will be cringing in embarrassment at this.
Struck a nerve did I? Is this what the radical animal rightists are going to do now? Play troll? Because I can tell you any argument on this site is going to end with the truth, not name-calling and temper tantrums.
Funny you should mention the moon and an owl. Aren’t those typically what your coven worships? Should I explain to my readers what I mean by that, Eden?
For the prior commenter and, I guess this one, I will allow the Dogsbite.org set to comment here, unlike Colleen Lynn, but you must be respectful when you do so, and implying that someone is crazy simply because they conjecture about the aspects of a case, as any good investigator would or should do, means you haven’t a counterpoint. But then, I would expect hysteria from the Dogsbite.org crowd. That’s pretty much what they do.
If the bath salts theory is so far off, then why did a Time magazine article from 1987 mention that dog fighters (i.e. extreme animal abusers) often dose their dogs with things to make them meaner? Do you think that doesn’t include street drugs? And as radical animal rightists you’d think you’d care about an animal being so horribly abused. Oh wait, no, it IS the radical animal rightists who abuse animals. I forgot. And why was that again? Oh that’s right. To end domestic animal ownership.
Like I said, I think I got a little too close to the truth on this one, and maybe that made your ilk nervous. I’ve noticed something about guilty people. When you get too close to uncovering their lies, they tend to lash out and name-call.
Here’s something you can take back to your coven when you slither back to them: Insinuations that I’m crazy aren’t going to get me to stop telling the truth, nor is slander, or any other, let’s just say wholly immoral behavior your crowd engages in.
Because the Dogsbite.org crowd couldn’t control themselves, I am now closing comments.
While I have no problem with someone offering a counterpoint or engaging in a rational discussion, I will not entertain insults and hysteria.