8:00am Thursday 16th October 2008
By Tomasz Johnson
Yesterday morning I looked on as dozens of armoured police officers, backed up with dog handlers, raided an East Finchley flat. They thought they might find four or five dogs, each easily capable of killing a child - in someone’s home.
If you look at it objectively, this is a pretty surreal state of affairs. I wouldn’t let a tiger loose in my flat, or a poisonous snake, probably not even a poisonous mushroom if I thought it might harm me.
Some people, though, think nothing of living with an animal that is genetically predisposed to vicious, aggressive behaviour and capable of ripping a human to pieces.
I could describe this as like keeping a loaded gun in your house. But really it’s like living with a deranged, aggressive man with a loaded gun, who might shoot you for no good reason.
Five-year-old Ellie Lawrenson died from severe head and kneck injuries January last year when she was attacked by a family dog in her grandmother’s house in Liverpool.
The dog was a type of pit-bull terrier restricted under the Dangerous Dogs Act - the kind of dog that has become a status symbol in London.
Apparently in Liverpool there are communities where every family has an aggressive dog. The Met has launched Operation Bark specifically to crack down on the growing phenomenon in the capital.
Ellie Lawrenson is now just one in a line of tragically young victims and what a horrific way it is to die.
In 2006 a five-month-old baby was killed by a rottweiler in Leicester and a four-year-old Cambridge boy needed 200 stitches in his face after he was attacked by an American bulldog.
If more and more people want their own “status symbol”, how long will it be before we’re reporting on a victim in Barnet?
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.times-series.co.uk/trade_directory/