Woody Cavenaugh

The headline read "Dog bites two year old." Mayodan's police chief answers with a self made list of naughty and nice dog breeds and a proposel to ban all those on his naughty list.

Sure, that's one way, but it isn't the right way.

What happened? A dog bit a two year old.
What REALLY happened? A mother and a father failed to be parents so an unsupervised child antagonizes a chained up dog whose only real concerns are trying to stay cool on a hot summer's day.

You've seen it before. Toddlers exploring their world, grab noses, pull beards, pull ears and poke eyes. When it happens to you and I we use our hands and our words to defend ourselves and when necessary to say "No" don't do that, it hurts. When it happens to the family pet and parents are around you can usually interfear before your best friend runs out of patience and has to say "no", using what he has available for the purpose.

There was no one around to protect the interest of this dog and he used what he had to say "no" when the unsupervised child wandered into the neighbor's yard to pat the doggie.

This is why I am proposing a manditory leash law on all walking children under the age of four while they are outside of their homes in the public eye. It is as much to protect them as it is the world they don't know how to explore yet. Obviously it would be simpler and more logical to demand that parents watch their children, but in today's society this is just too much to ask. The leash will help.

I must admit, there was a time in my life when I would've balked at such a proposal, but over the years I have come to realize that we as a species are losing our sense of self-preservation and so laws must be enacted to artifically force self-preservation upon us. As a species this completly screws us in the long run but we'll let our future generations worry about that.