Why do I love the smell of a set-up in the morning? Because it makes it easier to expose shady wrongdoings which stink to high heaven. Anyone else getting the feeling that there’s something really rotten in Elgin, Illinois, based on Elgin’s most recent “pit bull” incident? The Courier News made sure to include a photo in their report today about the two dogs involved in an incident in Festival Park on Friday just so we’d know they were “pit bulls,” though we still don’t definitively know what breed the dogs actually were. The two dogs were free-roaming on Friday, when they were found a mile from their home.
So, let’s take a closer look at the Elgin incident, which you can read about in today’s Courier News. The dog in question, we’re told, bit the victim’s forearm. Aren’t we told that these “vicious” “killer” “pit bulls” bite and don’t let go? That they do more damage when they bite and maul? Didn’t Elgin City Attorney William Cogley make a point of reading the supposed definition of “gameness” into record at the Elgin City Council meeting where BSL was being discussed in March? That definition, from Elgin’s prior “pit bull” ordinance proposal, states:
…the breed of dogs defined in this ordinance as “Pit Bulls” possess the quality of gameness, which can be described as the propensity to catch and mall [their misspelling, not mine] an attack victim unrelentingly until death occurs, or as the continuing tenacity and tendency to attack repeatedly for the purposes of killing….
The ordinance goes on to list some of the non-existent “breed” “pit bull’s” supposed inherent characteristics:
Pit Bulls have the following distinctive behavioral characteristics: (1) grasping strength; (2) climbing and hanging ability; (3) weight pulling ability; (4) a history of frenzy, which is the trait of unusual relentless ferocity or the extreme concentration on fighting and attacking; (4) [their error in counting, not mine] a history of catching, fighting and killing instinct; (5) the ability to be extremely destructive and aggressive; (6) highly tolerant of pain; (7) great biting strength; (8) undying tenacity and courage and being highly unpredictable…
Hmm, well, the “pit bull” in question in the Festival Park incident appears to not have had great grasping or biting strength, did not display frenzy or a relentless ferocity in fighting or attacking, nor did the dog appear to be extremely destructive or aggressive, or have an undying tenacity. Hey, have you heard this one? How can you tell a politician is lying?…His lips are moving.
Ok, so we’ve looked at what the dog(s) did and according to the City of Elgin’s own definition of what a “pit bull” is supposedly like and what a “pit bull” should supposedly do, their definition is wrong. While it’s good to deconstruct a supposed “pit bull” attack just to prove the “pit bull’s” critics wrong, the focus should not be on breed (though “pit bull” is not a breed) or in this case, even on what the dog(s) did. The proper question to ask about this incident is how did the dogs get to Festival Park in the first place?
The Courier News today reports,
[The dogs’ owner] had left her house to pick up her kids and upon her return found the gates to the dog’s cages open and a hole in her fence, police reports said.
I hate to break it to folks, but this is a classic modus operandi, not of gang bangers looking to steal “pit bulls” for their fighting rings (since it’s doubtful they would have let the dogs go and so quickly), but of animal rights activists who push breed-specific legislation (BSL) in target cities. I was told about this m.o. by a veteran BSL-fighter who has been fighting BSL for 15-20 years. He told me that sometimes animal rights activists release feral “pit bulls” in BSL target cities. Do they also steal them and then release them in target areas too?
And who knows what they do with them if/when they have stolen them. Do they inject them with adrenaline to make them meaner and then release them in a populated area, like say a park? Hopped up on adrenaline, wouldn’t any dog be more aggressive? (The dogs were reportedly panting heavily — “[The policemen] found the dogs were laying there panting pretty hard” — which can be indicative of an accelerated heart rate due to adrenaline. And yes, it was 82 for a high that day according to weather.com, but by almost 5 o’clock the heat would have begun subsiding.) Injecting dogs with adrenaline, my source told me, was not originally an m.o. of dog fighters but the brain child of radical animal rightists who distributed pamphlets back in the day that warned of the signs of “street” dog fighting, which hadn’t widely existed up til then. In other words, the animal rightists distributed a how-to primer on “street” dog fighting, in essence turning it into the underground bloodsport it is today. This in turn became a pretense for animal rightists to push for breed bans, which in turn is one more step to their end goal of eradicating domesticated pets.
Another m.o. of animal rightists is to call in phony “pit bull” attacks in BSL target cities. Hmm, and just look at the police blotter for Elgin last week:
Dog bite: Police were called to the 600 block of Douglas Avenue on Monday evening after receiving a report of a woman who was bitten by a dog. The victim told police she was bitten on her hip by a pit bull mix, black and white in color. She declined to be transported to the hospital for treatment.
So, how many “pit bull” “attacks” does that make under Councilman John Prigge’s one-year tenure? Four? Five? I’ve lost count.
And yes, some animal rights groups do advocate for breed bans and breed-specific laws. Members of PETA, the same animal rights group cited by Councilman John Prigge as a reason to pass BSL in Elgin, have also picked up perfectly adoptable animals from shelters, killed them, and dumped them in a dumpster (Clicking on the preceding link will link you to a page with pictures of dead animals. If you are sensitive to such images, do not click through.) although it should be noted that they were only found guilty of “littering”. (Read into that all the disgust you think ought to be there.) Details of what occurred and the resulting arrest can be found here.
While animal welfarists and even many animal rightists are of course opposed to killing perfectly adoptable animals (as well they should be), there is a very militant and radical faction of animal rights activists that has no compunction about killing domesticated animals. According to these radicals, domesticated animals — whether household pets or livestock — are creations of selective breeding, are not wild, and are therefore not “metaphysically free.” As such, in these radicals’ minds, killing these domesticated animals is like setting them free. This ideology is called “nativism.”
Now that folks know what could possibly have happened and why, Elgin citizens should be asking themselves: What does Councilman Prigge listen for on his police scanner? Why did Prigge in February cite PETA as a reason to pass BSL? Why have there been so many so-called “pit bull” attacks in the mere year that Prigge has been in office?
So Elgin, once again, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and lies like a duck, it could very well be a set-up.