Subject of earlier media frenzy, Congo bites again and is put down
By Gina Spadafori
June 21, 2008
I think to get the full flavor of this story, you’d have to live in the Tri-State area. But remember a few months ago how dog named Congo became a New Jersey media circus after he attacked a gardener and his owners fought to save his life? The whole thing was very messy, with lots of anti-immigrant overtones because the gardener was Latino and didn’t speak much English.
Congo lived. Until yesterday, when he and three other dogs were taken by the family to be killed after they attacked a relative. From the Times of Trenton:
The local couple who fought a successful high-profile campaign to spare their beloved Congo from a death sentence after he mauled a landscaper on their property last year had Congo and three of their other dogs euthanized Wednesday morning after the dogs attacked a relative visiting their home Tuesday, police said.
In the latest incident, Congo was one of four dogs that attacked 75-year-old Constance Ladd, the mother of one of the dogs’ owners, Elizabeth James, police detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said Wednesday.
Ladd had puncture wounds and lacerations to the top of her head, chest and right forearm and injured her hip when she fell to the ground as the dogs pounced on her, Silagyi said.
[...]
Despite the severity of the incident and the family’s decision to euthanize the dogs, the victim’s son-in-law, Guy James, strongly objected to its characterization by police as an attack by his dogs.
“I don’t want people who were supportive of Congo (after last year’s landscaper mauling) to think they were supporting a bad dog,” Guy James said in an interview. He said Tuesday’s unfortunate encounter between the dogs and his mother-in-law “wasn’t an attack at all. It was dogs jumping.”
Here’s the rest, and there is a lot more in the Trenton paper and elsewhere, including the victim’s initial attempts to deny investigators access to photographing her wounds.
Oh, this will go on for weeks.
Headline for story should read “Once again dog pays ultimate price for having mallet-headed owners”. Sigh.
Comment by Susan Fox — June 21, 2008 @ 7:13 pm
How sad for this to end this way. What a waste. Now all the suits in the govt can pat themselves on the back for the great job they did since the dogs were ultimately destroyed.
Comment by saintlover — June 21, 2008 @ 7:36 pm
saintlover … I’m curious … how do you figure this to be the government’s fault, since the owners were the ones who fought to keep Congo alive after the first attack?
Seems bad judgment on the owner’s part at the very least, and certainly poor management of a dog who had bitten before.
I wonder if they worked with a behaviorist or trainer at all after the first incident.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — June 21, 2008 @ 8:00 pm
As I warned at the time, we need to be careful in joining the “Save Mumia” type movements which may or may not have actual merrit. We are after all, little more than second or third hand observers looking at events thru the colored glasses of others who obviously have a “dog in the hunt”.
I have however sighted stories that have obvious injustices toward dogs and other animals including the off duty police officer who took the role of judge, jury and executioner and shot a dog on site who had apparently be engaged in little more than overly agressive play with his girlfriend’s dog.
I think what we need to take from this is that dogs are exactly what we make them. Vick’s dogs were killers because they did their master’s bidding. As further evidence of this we can look at the other recent blog that some of those very dogs are now proper citizens living good lives among humans. But we need to understand that from the point of view of the dogs, they are not doing anything different. They are just trying to fit in.
When I was a Cub Scout we aspired to be “Wolves” took a pledge to “Obey the Pack law…”. Should we be so surprised when the sons and daughters of wolves do exactly that?
The real question is, who was running the pack?
Comment by Bernard J. (Bernie) Starzewski — June 22, 2008 @ 10:18 am
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…
“An unprovoked bite is never the first sign of aggression in dogs. It’s the last.”
The learning curve for aggressive behaviours is relatively predictable, and thus, preventable. What can readily be corrected at the stiffened body posture stage, will likely lead to menacing barking, lunging, raised lips, growling, attempted bites, and finally successful bites, when left unchecked. (When dogs are never rewarded for the early signs of defiance or discomfort with a situation, they don’t progress to the more obvious behaviours we recognize as aggression. My 9-year-old Dane, for instance, has never growled. None of my own dogs have been aggressive.)
I was a dog bite researcher for eight years. In that time, every case I investigated, where the media and/or owners reported a biting dog “had no history of aggressive behaviour,” it always turned out to be untrue.
The trouble is, people often dismiss or minimize obvious signs of aggression. And, as a long-time dog trainer, I’m well-aware that many dog owners choose “management” or denial, over training.
The concept is so foreign to me that I’ve never really been able to get my head around it. If my dog is doing something I don’t like (much less is actually “anti-social” or dangerous), I correct that behaviour. The idea of letting it go on & probably escalating; expecting everyone else to accommodate me; or rearranging my life to “manage” my dog’s activities for the rest of its life, not only sounds odd, but tiresome and frought with likely pitfalls.
I’ll never understand why people don’t deal with the undesirable behaviours of their dogs. I spent at least a decade specializing in re-training aggressive dogs. Those dogs came from homes where aggression was allowed (maybe even rewarded). Once it was no longer permitted (and more appropriate behaviours were rewarded), the aggression ceases.
Aggression doesn’t get better because an owner vows his/her love for the animal. Aggression doesn’t go away because the owner erects a taller fence or walks the dog muzzled in public. Aggression, in fact, tends to worsen, over time. So if the owner doesn’t actively address the aggression, the dog will remain a danger, probably for the rest of its life.
It’s a shame that dogs pay the price for their owners’ negligence/incompetence. It’s equally clear that bad dog owners raise one poorly-behaved dog after another. It’s no surprise to me that this dog bit again (aggressive dogs usually do), or that the other dogs in the home were equally poorly-raised, or even that the owner chose death over proper training.
Comment by Marjorie — June 22, 2008 @ 6:14 pm
“I’ll never understand why people don’t deal with the undesirable behaviours of their dogs.”
Marjorie, I REALLY appreciate your comments and ALWAYS learn something useful. However rhetorical your question may have been, as a county shelter volunteer who has been around when staff discusses dogs who have been returned, it appears that laziness, ignorance of dog behavior and an utter inability to realize that they not only can, but must, address their dog’s behavior issues seem to be the main themes. From where I sit, Congo’s owners appear to be irresponsible,delusional, clueless idiots (I know, but what do I really think).
It has occurred to me more than once that maybe it is asking too much for the many people who lack self-awareness and the ability to engage in cognitive, rational thought to be able to parse another species’ behavior and take appropriate actions.
I have assisted at obedience classes where one of my tasks was to remind people to only say the command once. They would cheerfully and willingly agree and then proceed to say “sit, sit, SIT…sit…sit…”, like the primates that we are. How in the world would people like this, who don’t even know what they themselves are saying, ever perceive incipient signs of aggression in a dog?
Comment by Susan Fox — June 22, 2008 @ 7:54 pm
Well, Susan, you’re probably right. :-) I guess I’m still in that fantasy land of hoping people are smarter than (so many of them) typically demonstrate.
Comment by Marjorie — June 23, 2008 @ 4:58 am
Doesn’t NJ have a post-bite rabies quarantine law?
Wouldn’t Mr. James have to have lied to his vet to get all the dogs instantly killed — and the vet would have had to agree to do it?
There’s nothing weird about the dog behavior here — pack mentality gone rampant under human neglect, ho hum, who could have predicted these levies would fail.
But the behavior of the principle humans and the supporting cast is something else!
Comment by H. Houlahan — June 23, 2008 @ 7:29 am
H., if the dogs are killed immediately, their brains can be tested for rabies. Much quicker than waiting out the quarantine period to see if symptoms occur.
Allowing a quarantine period for owned animals with current vaccinations is a concession to the fact that people don’t regard their pets as so much toilet paper, and don’t want them killed without compelling reason. So no, they wouldn’t have had to lie to the vets to get them to kill the dogs, at least not because of rabies quarantine laws. For Congo at least, all they would have had to say is, “This is the second time the dog has attacked someone, and this time it was a family member.” Three other healthy dogs without some bite history, that might get an argument, but it’s not illegal.
Comment by Lis — June 23, 2008 @ 7:40 am