How do you feel about the law that if your dog bites someone you are required to put it down?

AmyHew1tt

I don't know if this is the rule everywhere, but I find it extremely immoral. If your dog is vicious, that's one thing. But I feel like it's unfair to have the dog killed when it's most likely the owner's fault for not training it properly, or babying bad behavior and not taking the time and effort to fix it.

This happened to my mom's friend a few years ago. She had this perfectly ordinary friendly dog, who she was legally bound to have put down after a visiting neighbor brought over her autistic child, who tried to climb onto the dog's back and was bitten. Shouldn't the mom have taken any responsibility in that case? The child is under her care, and she should have kept him in sight.

I feel it would be better overall for all parties (taking the severity of the incident into consideration obviously) if the dog owners paid a fine, half of which goes to the person who was bitten. The rest goes into paying for the dog's temporary relocation to a training center, or something like that.

My dog is literally the most docile animal I've ever met. He's only a year and a few months old, so if someone new comes over and he's riled up he'll sometimes jump, never aggressively, and usually only when our other dog is jumping around, but never anything else. Still, I recognize this is my responsibility to help train him out of, and in general, I'm not at all worried about his behavior. But we have one neighbor whose dogs seriously attacked mine several times unprovoked on our property and now he reacts badly to the owner. It gives me a lot of anxiety thinking something could happen and I'd be forced to put him down.

Do you have this law where you live? If you do, how do you feel about it?

How do you feel about the law that if your dog bites someone you are required to put it down?
5 Opinion