Not a Best Friend

I have a dog named Hoover, who serves no useful purpose. He doesn’t bark at strangers, bring in the newspaper, do tricks at parties or frolic with me. About all Hoover does is eat and sleep.

Although I’m not big on frolicking with dogs (I don’t frolic with humans, either), I wouldn’t mind if Hoover curled up at my feet occasionally.

The best he’ll do is lie on the floor in a corner and stare silently at me while I write, doubtlessly hoping my syntax will falter and my prose not scan.

Hoover, as you might have gathered, is not my best friend.

Even my wife, who loves all living things, is hard pressed to define what purpose he serves in our household.

The best she can say is he is not vicious and is probably more amiable in the long run than I am.

“But if either of you ever bites anyone,” she adds, “out you go.”

That makes sense. No woman should tolerate a biting man and no community ought to abide a vicious dog.

Permit me to further illuminate my attitude on the latter in a manner that leaves no room for confusion:

To hell with the notion that every dog is allowed one bite, to hell with the idea that mail carriers are a dog’s natural prey and to hell with those who keep dangerous animals.

I refer specifically to one breed of dog, and you know which one that is. If anyone ever started selling coats made from the hide of pit bulls, I’d be the first in line to buy one.

Having said that, let me add in modest defense of the breed that the pit bull isn’t the only dog that attacks.

Poodles, Pekingese pups, Chihuahuas, chows and Dandie Dinmont terriers will all take a piece of your hide under the right circumstances.

But, as an animal control officer pointed out to me yesterday, “a Pekingese can’t take your head off. A pit bull can.”

Tragically, we were reminded Tuesday exactly what kind of damage the dogs can do.

Two of them-- pets-- tore up a 70-year-old woman in South-Central Los Angeles to the extent that she died of her injuries. Even the amputation of an arm, its flesh ripped to the bone, couldn’t save her life.

The dogs, part pit bull, part boxer, were owned by her grandson. She was not a stranger to them. It wasn’t a case of protecting their territory.

The pit bull, bred a century ago by the British to fight and kill other dogs, is a danger not only to animals but to humans, and there obviously doesn’t have to be a good reason for them to go into the attack.

We hear too often of their assaults: children killed in Hawthorne, Ontario, Garberville and San Jose. An animal control officer attacked in L.A., two policemen attacked in Costa Mesa and pets attacked everywhere.

Animal activists cried rivers of tears last December when a postman in Pacoima shot a German shepherd named Skippy.

But who cries for the old lady in South-Central L.A.? Who cries for the children killed by dogs and for the 80,000 people bitten each year in L.A. County alone?

Not many. We even passed a state law that prevents local authorities from barring specific breeds of dogs, including a breed trained to kill.

One must assume, to give them the benefit of the doubt, that most of those who buy potentially dangerous dogs do so in response to a crime rate that has us all rattled.

The poet Acrisius wrote, “To him who is in fear, everything rustles,” and there’s nothing like a snarling animal to provide a measure of protection from humans who prey on other humans.

But there’s a problem here.

Listen to Investigator Keith Weeks, who specializes in this kind of thing for the county Health Department:

“People get mean dogs to protect them from burglars and train them to be meaner. But a dog doesn’t know the difference between a burglar and the little girl next door. That’s where the trouble begins.”

The average dog exerts a jaw pressure of 700 pounds per square inch. The average pit bull exerts a jaw pressure of more than 2,000 pounds.

Weeks knows of one man who trained a pit bull by having it bite into a car tire on a rope, then hoisting the tire upward with the dog clinging to it by its teeth.

That dog, as it turned out, didn’t know the difference between a tire and a human. It killed a little boy in Hawthorne.

I like animals, despite Hoover’s reluctance to be a pal and my own reluctance to romp with puppies. I tolerate with reasonable patience a long list of their indiscretions.

But laws prohibit grizzly bears in back yards because grizzlies, in a fit of pique, can tear your heart out. We ought to know by now that pit bulls can too. That sure as hell doesn’t make either of them man’s best friend.