From the article…
“It appeared the attack was a violent attack initiated by the victims’ dogs while the victim was out for a walk with the dog.”
“It was very clear that the woman in the wounds had suffered some very severe injuries consistent with being mauled by these dogs,” he added.
It doesn’t say there is a pending investigation so I would assume they found enough evidence to conclude it.
Or different bite patterns on the body, tracks, etc…there would be evidence.
That very well could be but at the end of the day a woman owned two large and aggressive dogs that she could not control and she is dead.
The dogs are not at fault because they were just doing what comes naturally to them that humans have bred/trained into them, the owner was at fault.
Can you link the articles that you’ve read?
I remember that case you speak of, wasn’t it a woman walking past her neighbour’s apartment to get to hers?
I just spent about 15 minutes looking for articles that @Marla 100 may have read. I couldn’t find a single article (read about 20) that mentioned anything other then a pit bull. Even googling the victims name with Canary Mastiff or Presa Canario came up with nothing.
I agree that the weights of 120-130lbs in the article don’t point to a pit bull, however the dogs in the pictures in the articles I read don’t look to be over 80lbs, let alone 130lbs. My guess is that these dogs aren’t pure bred anything, and that’s why the easiest assumption is a Pit. I would think that if the victim called them something else then the father or friends would have corrected everyone. One article stated that the victims relatives were calling for euthanasia.
I don’t believe the statements from the friend either. I find it very unlikely that it took the father two days to find the victim or the dogs, but the dogs were able to hear her in trouble and broke out of their cages? If something else like a wolf or coyote attacked her (which is very unlikely, attacks on humans, especially an adult with large dogs is extremely rare) then I would expect the dogs to have battle wounds as well.
At least the dogs killed her and not anyone un-associated with her, like an innocent kid or old lady. Pits turning on their owners isn’t exactly uncommon. Google Darla Napora. I think an old lady out in California was killed by her dogs last week. An old guy in MD was killed by his Pit a few years ago when he was taking his Christmas tree down. It happens.
It’s a shame for her family that it happened this close to holidays, but If you kept a tiger, would you really be surprised when it turned and killed you?
I’m sure plenty of excuses will be made for the dogs, in any case. There’s no chance that anyone who’s seen the dogs is remotely capable of properly identifying them; even if they’ve known the dogs for years.
Here’s a wikipedia about the Diane Whipple murder. I call it that because of the indifference of the attacking animal’s owners:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Diane_Whipple
They were attorneys for the animal’s owner, a white supremacist at Pelican Bay prison (for only the worst criminals), and they had ‘adopted’ or were in the process of ‘adopting’ him. The animals were bred for fighting, and were a money making operation.
I did the wikipedia, because there are no pictures. There are other articles out there that describe the scene much more graphically. The dog owners tried to blame the victim for the attack. The animals had also attacked a seeing eye dog in the building also, as I recall. The prison time the dog owners received was nothing compared to the crime.
[I]Experts said the killing of a young woman by her dogs in rural Goochland County last week may have resulted from misdirected aggression and it was unlikely that it had anything to do with them being pit bulls.
Bethany Stephens, 22, of Glen Allen, was found by her father Thursday. Goochland Sheriff James Agnew said Sunday that, “the way he described it, he could not get to his daughter’s body because the dogs were guarding the body and these were rather menacing dogs.”
“She had walked the dogs there in the past,” Agnew said. Asked if the dogs were friendly to her, Agnew said, “I don’t know the answer to that. They were her dogs. I guess you could assume that, but I don’t know.”\
Amy L. Pike, of the Veterinary Referral Center of Northern Virginia and a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, said, “Dogs don’t just attack out of the blue. They are typically scared or threatened by something.”
“This is thankfully very rare and obviously very tragic,” she said.
Pike said, “I don’t know anything about these dogs or her personal relationship with them, but there are likely to have been precursors to this, I suspect, either in terms of fear and anxiety or potentially aggression issues in either one of these dogs to have happened this way.”
She said dogs can redirect aggression toward their owners or other dogs nearby when they are threatened.
“It’s very possible there was something else that scared them and unfortunately either they got into a fight with one another and she was trying to break it up or one or both redirected towards her in the moment,” she said.
Agnew said Stephens was small, about 5 feet 1 inch tall and 125 pounds, and estimated that the dogs may have weighed as much as her.
Janet Velenovsky, an animal behavior consultant in Montpelier, said, “If she was as small as I read, she could be knocked down and then before you know it the redirection happens on her instead of whatever they were trying to get to.”
“If she fell over, got tripped or pushed or something, and now she’s on the ground, if she squeals or something like that … that may have directed their attention toward her. It’s just the saddest thing. My heart goes out to her family and father,” she said.
Velenovsky said the answer about what happened could possibly lie in the training methods used on the dogs in the past.
Pike and Velenovsky said it is unlikely the attack had anything to do with the dogs being pit bulls. Pike said “‘pit bull’ is not actually a breed. It’s just the look of a dog.”
“Any dog can bite, even an eight-pound Chihuahua can bite. But, certainly, the bigger the dog and the more powerful the dog, the more dangerous aggression can be,” said Pike.
The sheriff said he does not know if the dogs had been trained to fight. He said one of her friends told an investigator the dogs had been adopted, she thought, through a group that rescues former fighting dogs. “I have not confirmed that,” he said.
Pike said, “Dogs that are bred to fight are actually trained not to redirect to people because it has to be very safe for the handler to be able to get in there and pull the dogs apart after the fight is over.”
“Fighting pit bulls — ones specifically bred for that — tend to be very nice to people,” Pike said.
“Anytime people see fear or anxiety or stress in their animals, that can potentially lead to aggression because most aggression is fear-based,” she said.
Anyone with concerns about their dogs can see their veterinarian or a veterinary behaviorist who can help manage aggression and treat the underlying fear and anxiety.
I know pits and other fighting dogs are not supposed to be human aggressive, but there were several cases on Pit Bulls & Parolees where the animals were.
One was a so-called innocent pit that was with the owner’s group of unneutered, unregistered, roaming dogs that savagely attacked a young man. The back story was on local media about the visit to the animal control facility, where the four animals involved, including the so-called innocent one were very aggressive, and a crew member was actually bitten. That rescue involved a one-sided, interview with the owner and his mother, and neglected to include that the animals had a long history of roaming free, aggression, had already attacked another person that day, and severely mauled a young man in a parking lot. The dog had a lot of restrictions by the court, and the continuous whining by the Villalobos people was pathetic, and the dog supposedly died soon after of a heart attack.
Another one in California was owned by a woman, and the dog had to be kept in a fully enclosed kennel, and the Villalobos people had to use two leashes, with a person on the far end, to even get near the dog. That owner still kept the dog, and it was clearly a danger to her own family, and any animal or person that it might get near on the street. I don’t know what happened with that dog, but I doubt it was a good ending.
Or it was on the top of the OPs news feed like it was on mine.
I read this on another discussion forum and have asked for links. Seems that this breed was assumed because of the
weight of the dogs- 120-130 lbs. I’ll keep looking.
That doesn’t happen by magic, that happens because, by algorithm, you’re more likely to click on it.
It was most likely her own dogs. Coyotes might bite, but if her own dogs were there…they sure wouldn’t have gone in with the coyotes to attack her. There have only been two known, recorded death by coyote attack on a human in N. America. Regardless of breed of dog, all are capable of killing a human. Some breeds are certainly made more effective for such an attack by our selective breeding over the centuries.
I wonder if these articles are inarticulately written and what they really mean was that the COMBINED weight of the 2 dogs was in excess of the very petite owner?! I am trying to imagine a 120+ lb dog that is not obviously a mastiff type or something like a St. Bernard. I look at the photos of these two dogs and I can’t imagine that they do weigh 120+ lbs. My collie weighs 60lbs. These dogs would be TWICE AS HEAVY AS HER. I think that would have to mean a molasser/mastiff/exceptionally oversized breed like a cane corso. In the photos I don’t see that?!
From the WaPo:
Investigators in Goochland, Va., a rural community about 30 miles outside of Richmond, say the petite, 5-foot-1 young woman, who weighed a little more than 100 pounds, was mauled to death by her dogs, which had a combined weight of about twice hers, while out on a walk earlier this week. Her father found her Thursday evening in a wooded area that used to be a farm, about a half a mile from the main road, Agnew told The Washington Post.
She apparently raised the dogs from puppies. They were known to her friends & family. I suspect her family knew what the dogs were. The friend who claims that someone must have murdered her, that the dogs didn’t actually kill, sounds like the type who would be screaming from the top of her lungs if the dogs weren’t some sort of pit bull/pit bull cross.
My mother had a 90# female AKC dalmation; I guy worked with briefly had a 100# boxer. There are outliers in every breed.(17 H Arab or Morgan anyone??) I always love when someone says “Oh but it couldn’t have been a 90 or 100 pit bull”, especially since a) there is no breed standard for pit bulls, since it’s a type not a breed; b) pit bulls are often crossed with other breeds and c) a 100# bad @ss dog is always better than a 60# bad @ss dog.
I read that a friend didn’t think the girl had the dogs with her when she went walking and the dogs’ kennels looked like they had broken out. She thinks maybe something else attacked her and the dogs broke out and found her. Long shot, but that’s what the girl’s friend said on Yahoo.
I think the story that the dogs broke out of their kennel to save her is pure apomorphism
I didn’t read the article and I just glanced through this thread, but I had a friend of friend who was killed by his brother’s 2 pits maybe 10 years ago now. From what I understand, the two pits attacked said friend’s dog and he got in between them and the dogs wound up turning on him and killing him. I have known some very sweet pits and try not to discriminate, but this incident was terrible. I think any breed of dog is capable.
There was a press conference this evening. They released a lot of info and cleared up a lot of things that they released that weren’t true. One being that the dogs were not as big as they originally reported…another being that the girl was not living at home anymore and she was only coming a few times a week to take them for walks. Based on what they said, the dogs weren’t getting much human interaction and there was question as to whether they were being neglected (not by her, but by her dad). Would this cause them to kill her? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure living inside and being with their owner all of the time and then they are forced to live outside in the elements and without their owners could set off some things.
The investigators are very positive that a wild animal did not attack her – she had puncture (bite) wounds on her head that were consistent with a small animal. Had it been a large animal her skull would have been penetrated.They also noted that the dogs were covered in blood…
Either way - I just think it’s rather disturbing to think about our pets turning on us. I own 2 Great Danes and the thought just gives me chills. Do I think they would ever turn on me? Probably not. But there is always a question! My dogs are truly 170lbs and 126lbs…they could hurt us in a heart beat!
I think NBC12 has the entire press conference on video!
I just read some of that update. What a nightmare.
Somewhere the best friend mentioned the dogs were only aggressive when they defended her… but that also means the dogs were seen acting aggressively, but it was accepted because of how they interpreted it.
I’m sorry for her, her dad, family etc. but I am soo glad her pets didn’t do this to some random children or adults.
Other than that, I am seriously sorry for the police that had to play mop up to the whole scene…
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You may also receive promotional emails from The Chronicle of the Horse. You can opt out at any time.
For Customers
Company
Terms of Use
