From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000--


Vigilante actions against dogs who bite children

LIMA--One of the first public animal rights demonstrations in Peru
featured an estimated 200 people marching with dogs on leashes through the
affluent Lima suburb of Miraflores on July 21 to protest the shooting of a
10-month-old Staffordshire terrier named Venancio.
Venancio, the pet of march organizer Hector Rospigliosi, on the
evening of July 1 reportedly rushed up to an 11-year-old boy who was
playing with a ball in a public park. Barking loudly, Venancio scared the
boy, who according to his father was bitten on the hand while trying to
keep possession of the ball. The boy fled to his grandfather. The
grandfather fetched a handgun from his car.
Rospigliosi immediately leashed Venancio, he told Associated Press
correspondent Rick Vecchio, and walked away, calling the police as he did
so on a cellular telephone. The grandfather meanwhile called the boy's
father on a cellular telephone of his own. The father raced to the scene,
allegedly stopped Rospigliosi at gunpoint, and shot Venancio just before
the police arrived.
The protesters collected 2,783 petition signatures demanding that
the father be prosecuted for cruelty. But the atmosphere was inauspicious:
a week earlier an American pit bull reportedly mauled four men in a Lima
park, after the men evicted the dog's owner from a picnic.

U.S. cases

Two U.S. courts on September 21 found in comparable cases that
reactively killing a dog who has attacked a child is not necessarily
prosecutable cruelty even if it is not done in a law-abiding manner.
Seven-year police officer Ken Cannon, 31, of Gaines-ville,
Florida, was acquitted by a jury of alleged cruelty and discharging a
firearm too close to a road, after shooting a husky/ German shepherd mix
belonging to neighbor Linda Carpenter on April 29, 11 days after the dog
bit Cannon's then-9-year-old daughter Amber on the head, shoulder, chest,
and arm. Carpenter kept the dog chained to a tree between her house and
Cannon's. Animal control director Rick Phillips did not impound the dog
for rabies quarantine until three days after the attack--and Carpenter,
upon retrieving the dog after the quarantine, chained him to the same
tree.
Amber Cannon meanwhile suffered recurring nightmares about the
attack. The jury--of its own initiative-- recommended an inquiry into the
animal control department. Suspended without pay after the shooting, Ken
Cannon remained under suspension pending completion of a police
disciplinary review.
In a similar but less comparable case, William D. Olmstead, 69,
of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, on September 21 escaped prosecution for drowning
a terrier who had bitten three people in under a year, most recently a
nine-year-old girl. Wauwatosa municipal judge Richard Baker said that
Olmstead could not be prosecuted, even though he pleaded "no contest,"
because the wrong charge was filed. Baker also fined Olmstead's wife Anne,
66, for letting the dog run at large. Wauwatosa police said Olmstead
would be re-charged under a different section of law.