Family Pet Mauls Child

People who love children and who have children have a responsibility to protect them, to allow them to be children while ensuring they grow and thrive in a safe and nurturing environment. They have a responsibility to teach children how to grow into adulthood, teaching them step-by-step how to safeguard their own futures by themselves becoming responsible, both to themselves and to those who will follow.

Thus, parents have a responsibility to their children. Grandparents have a responsibility also, to their grandchildren. We love our children, understand how vulnerable they are to untoward events, to accidents which may occur as a result of their inability to understand the consequences of their actions, whether it is to push something into an electrical outlet, to withdraw a poisonous substance from a kitchen undercounter, or to prod and irritate the family pet.

Adults have a responsibility to the companion animals they bring into their homes. As with children, their responsibility is to feed and to nurture and to socialize that animal. If it is a large dog, that responsibility becomes more urgent, to ensure that the animal understands through careful and long-standing indoctrination and teaching, that it must behave in a satisfactory manner toward the others that share its abode, and to which it is occasionally exposed outside the home.

And when adults, and parents have a combination of small children, along with family pets, that responsibility is doubled, becomes more relevant and pressing. Children must be taught to respect animals, not to bother them. Animals, because they are animals and their behaviours are unexpected at times and potentially critical, must at all times be monitored in the presence of children.

There's a potent potential for great harm in exposing an infant or a toddler to a large animal, no matter how well socialized the dog is, how satisfied the dog owner is that the dog's behaviour can be anticipated. When the two are left alone together, even for short periods of time, an instant is sufficient for great harm to come to a child. People are warned of this time after time by animal behaviourists, and by hospital spokespeople who often are faced with the task of repairing great physical damage to children caused by encounters with dogs.

We become too complacent. We're too busy to pay full attention. We simply don't want to believe that anything seriously untoward can happen, between the child we love and the animal we trust. But it will, it does, and when the unanticipated event occurs, tragedy ensues. A child mauled by an angry or taunted, or hot and tired dog, with no adult present to discipline it before the tragedy occurs, and to retrieve the child from imminent danger.

The child can't be saved. The dog is euthanized. The family lives forever with the memory.