It was a lovely spring afternoon. My wife, Linda, and I took our dog, Stella, for a walk to a neighborhood park on Madison’s north side. On the way, we passed a house on Northport Drive where a pit bull sat, about 100 feet away, watching us intently. There was no fence or tether, but the dog stayed put. On our way back home a half-hour later, we passed the dog again. This time it came charging down to the sidewalk, toward Stella on her leash.
Stella is a rescue mutt, with DNA from 17 breeds. (“She’s every kind of dog,” I sometimes tell people who ask.) Stella weighs 20 pounds. She has pointy ears and dark brown fur, with a white blaze on her chest and silver tips on her paws. She’s 13 years old (almost all spent with us) but is often mistaken for a puppy. She’s fit and spry, and makes leaping frisbee catches. We love her dearly.
In what seemed like an instant, the pit bull had Stella in its mouth. I was on the ground, my face inches from the dog’s jaws, which were locked onto Stella’s side. It was shaking her like a rag doll. I remembered seeing a pit bull kill a cat this way, when I lived on Williamson Street in the mid-1990s.
In our case, the pit bull eventually let go, shortly after I grabbed onto its collar, which came off in my hand. Linda (the associate editor of Isthmus) and I gathered Stella up. There was a round patch on her left side, about four inches in diameter, from which all of the fur and some of the flesh had been torn away. “Oh, no!” I was shouting. It was about 5:10 p.m. on Thursday, May 4.
Several cars on Northport Drive pulled over during the attack. Some guy was trying to get control of the pit bull, while saying it was “not my dog.” The dog’s collar was lying on the sidewalk. The dog was still loose when we left, accepting a ride from one of the people who stopped. She drove us home, about a mile away. Stella sat on my lap in the back seat, completely still and silent.
We left right away for the emergency vet clinic, and were there until almost midnight. Two of the four other dogs we saw come in were victims of pit bull attacks. One was a medium-size dog with a much smaller bite wound than Stella’s. The other was a big, goofy, two-year-old golden retriever whose wounds from an attack the week before had gotten infected. The retriever’s owner told us the pit bull had turned on its owner when she had tried to intervene, biting off her face below the nose. She said the owner, with two toddlers at home, planned on keeping the dog.
The vet anesthetized Stella to work on her side wound, which took about a dozen stitches across a five-inch span; she also had a bite mark on her neck and some bruising. A tube was installed under her skin for blood and other fluids to drain. We had to keep it clean, replacing the bloody gauze several times a day. I have a video of the tube being pulled out, like a long tapeworm.
We stayed with Stella constantly until her wounds healed, which took more than a month. Amazingly, she is not terrified of other dogs.
For Linda and me, it’s another story. We never encounter another dog without assessing whether it might attack. Quite a few times in our walks since then, we’ve seen (what, did we just not notice before?) aggressive dogs straining against their owners’ leashes, eyes on Stella. We stop, and sometimes scoop her up protectively. It’s what we should have been doing all along.
A driver who stopped during the attack on Stella called non-emergency dispatch at 5:19 p.m. “CALLER SAW DOG SNARLING AND PEOPLE SCREAMING” the dispatch notes say. The call was routed to Cheri Carr, an animal control officer with Public Health Madison & Dane County. The caller told her the pit bull’s owner came out of the house and retrieved it, blaming the dog for the attack. The owner also said a second pit bull lived in the house and that the two had to be kept apart at all times, lest they fight. Think about that for a moment.
Carr asked for backup from Madison police but was told no officers were available. So she went alone to the house with the two pit bulls and knocked on the door. No one answered. It wasn’t until the next day, after repeated efforts, that Carr tracked down the pit bull’s owner. He said the dog was contained by an electric fence and shock collar that must have failed. He expressed regret over the attack and, according to Carr’s report, said he knew he must now “keep the dog on a tie-out or leashed at all times.” He was issued two citations — one for letting an animal “run at large, unleashed or unattended,” the other for causing an injury off property — and fined a total of $311.
The agency also opened a dangerous dog investigation, to be conducted by Shannon Meyer, a lead worker with the health department’s animal control staff. This includes site visits and talking with neighbors, who are given letters seeking information about the dog under investigation. The public health department can prescribe various remedies, from fencing to training to euthanasia, which the owner can appeal. Meyer told me that orders to euthanize animals are very rare.
“Sometimes we require training [but] in a situation like this when a dog is that aggressive, quite honestly, there is no training that’s going to fix that,” Meyer told me. “It’s a management situation. You can’t train an aggressive dog. It’s just something you have to manage for the dog’s life.”
Not long ago, The New Yorker ran an article in which someone claimed “pit bulls are not among the most aggressive breeds,” a real low moment for the magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers. From 2010 to June 2021, in one widely cited study by a personal injury law firm, pit bulls and pit bull mixes accounted for 226 of the 430 fatal dog attacks on humans in the United States, or 60%. The next most deadly breed was rottweiler, at 7%.
On the day after Stella was attacked, Carr told me: “I wish people would stop denying the genetics of these dogs,” meaning pit bulls. Of course, there are pit bulls as sweet as the day is long. But there are also some that, despite the ardent efforts of devoted owners, never lose their impulse for aggression. And some have been made mean on purpose.
Amy Stocklein
The author and his much loved 13-year-old rescue mutt, Stella.
Of the more than 4,000 reported dog bites in Madison and Dane County since 2017, pit bulls have accounted for more bites than any other breed, about 15% of the total for whom a breed is known, according to a tally compiled for me at Meyer’s behest. The next most bitey breeds were labrador retriever (10%) and German shepherd (7%).
And pit bulls have been the culprit in six of the area’s 12 fatal dog attacks on other animals since 2016. Two of the animals who died were cats, nine were dogs, and one, killed by a pit bull via infection, was a donkey.
The most recent of these fatal attacks involved, according to Meyer, “a pit bull that had no prior problems” and a 13-year-old victim dog whose owner took the dog to the vet but could not afford treatment; the dog died several days later.
Another fatal attack we learned about happened on a busy north-side street in August 2022, when a pit bull pushed through the bottom of a chain link fence and snatched up a small dog that was walking by with its owner, pulling it into the yard and killing it, apparently by snapping its spine.
The pit bull’s owner in that attack told Carr the dog had breached the fence before, to go after other dogs. Yet the owner mightily resisted fixing the fence, even after she bought him some zip ties from a nearby hardware store. The dog was impounded until this was done. During one encounter, Carr’s report notes, the owner began “yelling and swearing at me.” He blamed the attack on the dog that was killed, because it was not on a leash.
After about a week, some fixes to the fence were made and the dog was returned. The health department paid the cost of impoundment. The dog’s owner was given a warning but no fines and urged to put up an opaque privacy fence, which he hasn’t done. The pit bull sometimes sits unchained in the yard. A sign on the house says “BEWARE OF DOG.”
The owner of the dog that bit Stella is a convicted felon who spent four months last year in the Dane County Jail for violating the terms of his release on a 2019 charge of repeat drunk driving causing injury. He’s not allowed to vote or possess a gun. But he can have a dog that attacks. The state Legislature is now weighing a bill sponsored by Sen. Andre Jacque (R-DePere) to bar some felons from having dangerous dogs; it passed the state Senate last session but never came up for an Assembly vote, despite a unanimous committee recommendation.
In mid-May, I sent the pit bull’s owner copies of Stella’s veterinary bills, totaling more than $800, which state law requires be reimbursed. He came by our house about two weeks later to pay in cash. He apologized for what happened, saying he knew it must have been “traumatic.” He said this was his fifth pit bull and that none had caused problems before.
That wasn’t true. In 2021, the dog that attacked Stella had bitten its owner, seriously enough to require medical treatment, when he tried to separate it from another dog that had entered into the electronic perimeter. Using an electric fence for this animal, Carr told me, was “unacceptable.” They are not meant for aggressive dogs. (“NO! We will not sell a Hidden Dog fence to a potentially dangerous dog,” exclaims one vendor’s website.)
Meyer, who like Carr appears to be hard-working and deeply conscientious, told me that animal control “would not accept an electric fence as a fencing option if we declare the dog dangerous.” A month after the attack, when I asked for an update, Meyer said the dog owner’s mother, who lives in the same house, had explained they were now changing the batteries in the dog’s shock collar more often “and watching him closely when he is out.” That was it — no fence as promised, no “tie-out” or leash.
Bill Lueders
Stella’s side wound required about a dozen stitches.
I was stunned by this. Meyer said she was not agreeing this was a reasonable fix, just “letting you know what the owner told me they are doing while the investigation is underway. We can’t require anything until the investigation is complete.”
Four months after Stella’s attack, the investigation remains open and incomplete. Meyer said in early July that she’s “visited the property, met the dog and am in regular communication with the owner,” who was looking to find a new place to live. Recently, the dog that attacked Stella had a “conflict” with the other pit bull on the property and is now kept crated in the basement. Said Meyer on Aug. 10: “I am hopeful that the living situation will change soon, which would be better for everyone and the dogs.” At the end of the month, she reported, some progress had been made: The dog was neutered.
When the owner came by to pay up and apologize, I didn’t say anything nasty, but I was angry and it showed. I now regret not being kinder, to acknowledge that he had tried to see things from my perspective. What is the point of having pets if not to make us better people? The pit bull that attacked Stella is a dangerous animal that will probably attack again. Its owner is just a guy who loves his dog.
