It’s Time to Rein In Pit Bulls

There is, in this newspapering craft of mine, a saying:

Dog bites man is not news. But man bites dog--that’s a headline.

What this means is that the ordinary, the routine in life is not newsworthy, as in dogs biting men. But news is the exception; news is a man biting a dog for a change.

Yet we are reminded this week that sometimes the cliche doesn’t hold.

Dog did bite man. A family pit bull killed a 14-month-old boy named Fily Araujo--and it was news, big, nightmarish, top-of-the-hour, top-of-the-page news. As his mother unloaded groceries from a Sunday shopping trip, the boy went into his own backyard, and there, Payaso, the family dog bought to protect the family, the dog whose name means Clown and who had grown up with little Fily, attacked the child with a fury. The bites to his neck and face were so devastating that the little boy died a few hours later. The dog had already killed a stray who wandered into his yard, and the boy’s great-grandmother was terrified that “the baby could be next.”

The day before, in spite of the old saw, man bit dog too. On Saturday, another pit bull, a year old and white when you get through the mange and the road-burn, was found garroted with a telephone cord, shot in the neck with a small caliber handgun and finally shoved out a car window onto the Hollywood Freeway.

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‘Tis the season. Puppies and kittens are being born, too many of them, more dogs and cats, as another wrongheaded cliche goes, than you can shake a stick at. They wind up at the supermarket, crawling adorably around in a cardboard box, fluffy and irresistible as Easter chicks. Then, like Easter chicks, they grow up, no longer a novelty.

And, once in a while, a threat. Pit bulls are being classified as a big a risk to public health, especially the health of children, as gunfire. Indeed, the city’s animal services spokeswoman likens having a pit bull in the house to “having a loaded gun. Would you leave a child alone with a loaded gun?” Gangbangers use pit bulls to intimidate. Not long ago, a young man committed a drive-by shooting from a bicycle--with a pit bull perched on the seat in front of him.

Yet officials have had no more luck clamping down on pit bulls than they have had clamping down on guns. The late Supervisor Kenneth Hahn tried once, and the state Supreme Court told him no dice.

And so the supervisors will try again. Perhaps certain breeds of dogs can be ranked with certain kinds of guns, classed as a nuisance and a danger beyond other breeds. For that, says the county’s animal control director, is what pit bulls have become; the bites they inflict, especially on children, are far out of proportion to the dogs’ numbers.

Some children are remembered in death, for their deaths change hearts and minds. Polly Klaas was one. Perhaps Fily Araujo will be another.

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Kevin Byrne just moved here from New York, and the other day--welcome to L.A.--someone smacked into his station wagon. So he was driving slowly down the southbound 101 freeway, when the black Nissan Maxima in front of him braked, and someone shoved something squirming and struggling out of the dark-tinted window. A dog.

Byrne retrieved him and took him to his vet. Paul Girgis had seen worse, but not much. Shooting the dog and throwing him onto the freeway? “That was the shocking thing to me.” Maybe the doctors at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center thought the same when Fily Araujo was brought in; maybe they had seen worse, but not much.

The vet dug out the bullet, bathed the mange, treated the road rash. The dog is at the Los Angeles SPCA, whose citywide billboard campaign reminds Angelenos that “Not every abuse victim can call for help.” The SPCA has a hotline for reporting abuse, (800) 540-SPCA, and it rang more than 200 times last year. Man bites dog, all right.

Tolstoy once wrote that the slaughter of men in war will never end until the slaughter of animals in peacetime ends too. A century after Tolstoy said that, Gov. Pete Wilson signed a law requiring that anyone convicted of animal abuse who wants probation instead of jail must submit to psychiatric counseling; there is something so wrong with beating and burning and stomping pets that most violent criminals get their start on small animals before moving on to bigger, human game.

Now maybe that law can be bookended by another law, one governing the breeding and sale and ownership of dogs that have been ranked up there with drugs and gunfire. Maybe they will call it the Fily Araujo law, a memorial, and a reminder.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.