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I don't believe that a dog who has bitten or attacked a human should ever be put down unless it is proved to be rabid. That is the one case that I know of where nothing else can be done for the dog.

Most of the time when a dog has bitten or attacked a person it is because it was provoked. Whether intentional or unintentional humans provoke attacks. Dogs sometimes perceive people or children as threats if we approach too quickly or approach with something in our hands that they can't identify.

I have seen children throw rocks at the dogs in my neighborhood, stand outside of the fences and spit at the dogs or poke at them through the fence with pencils or sticks just to keep them barking. And I have seen a grown man stomp his foot at a barking dog just to irritate it.

Granted, there are those few cases where someone may be walking down the street and get attacked or bitten by a dog that thinks that it is defending it's home or family. The person or child may do nothing at all other than to walk by and still they are bitten or attacked. But, I think that we have to ask...has this dog been trained by the owners or someone else to attack?

I used to have a neighbor who owned 2 Doberman. She was a rather strange woman, she and her young daughter lived alone; didn't talk to any of the neighbors; they were rarely seen, but her next door neighbor did observe her feeding the Doberman raw hamburger.

As I and my friend were walking our Elk hounds past her house one night, we were scared half out of our wits to see one of these Doberman bounding towards us, teeth bared. As it approached us, barking, snarling, my dog's leash got tangled around my legs and my friend was trying to help me when this lady came rushing out of her house with a baseball bat; smashed the Doberman in the head with it and without saying another word to either of us she drug this 60 or 70lb dog back into the yard and locked it inside of the gates. She then disappeared inside her back door and left us standing there wondering what the dickens just happened?

We later learned that they were guard dogs, trained to kill which was why she had been so quick to use the bat! She kept the dogs to protect her and her little girl from her ex-husband. She fed them raw meat to make them mean. I shudder to think what might have happened if she had not been home and that dog had gotten after us.

While I understand why she kept such vicious dogs; I also wish that more people would realize that it's

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