(Our animal friends)
What kind of human-‘worse than animals’ leave a dog in a garbage bag at a Costco parking lot to freeze to death? (Probably the same kind that abandoned the bins of cats to die recently.) I have long said that people who want to own pets should be licensed or at least go through a course to make it more difficult for people to own animals, to make them more aware of what pet ownership entails, and to weed out people who should never be allowed to own pets.
The other incident in the local news here is about an American Staffordshire Terrier (part of the pit bull group) being dogsat at a house attacked a three-year-old. What is a pit bull breed doing walking around free inside a strange home? Now that it’s had a taste of a child and human skin and blood, what is the dog’s future? What is likely to happen to the owner? You’d think this was also a wake-up call to the sitters about the owner who obviously misrepresented the dog and the likely effects on their relationship.
Owning a pet, particularly a dog, requires human responsibility. The humans in these two cases failed abysmally and the result was serious trauma, injury and near-death. No, people cannot be willy-nilly trusted to own dogs. They need to be educated and screened first. The well-being of dogs and other humans (especially children) depends on it. There is far too much casualness and unreliability about too many dog owners. Animal abuse and cruelty are some of the worst of human behaviors.