Life's a Coast

In the interest of the welfare of visitors and uninformed residents, we feel compelled to document the exorbitant number of incidents of attacks by dogs upon other animals and humans, sadly to include children. Whereas this is an increasingly nationwide problem, South Florida -- and especially Broward County (Lauderdale, Hollywood, Hallandale, Pompano, Dania, Boca, Deerfield, et al) -- is the epicenter of vicious mad attack dogs.

Almost all other counties in Florida (even demented Miami/Dade) have enough common sense to outlaw the ownership of commonly-known vicious attack dogs -- such as Rottweilers, pit bulls, mastiffs, boxers, dobermans, et al -- but Broward and Palm beach counties do not. So, not only is there an excessive number of residents of those two counties wielding attack dogs, but they are also besieged by residents from neighboring counties that "secretly" (supposedly) harbor mad dogs in their fenced back yards and bring them to Broward and Palm Beach to get out and intimidate the populace there.

In Broward, the large number of dog-owning residents forces the county to be sympathetic to dog owners, and not only do the county commissioners and public officials bow down to the dog owners, but "it is said" that the police are required to "look the other way" when violations of ordinances occur (violations occur all the time, and we have never once observed anyone being ticketed for dog law violations,and we have observed police drive by an infraction in progress and actually look away).

Recently, Broward county changed one of their "dog laws" to provide a "second chance", which allows dogs that have killed for the first time to go free with a "second chance", with the unstated freedom for the dog -- that now has activated it's inherent instinct to attack and kill and now assumes that it must be OK since it it got away with killing -- to have the second chance to attack and kill again. This due to the fact that owners of dogs convicted of killing, were filing lawsuits against the county, and the commissioners chose not to "waste" any of their precious taxpayer dole in defending against the lawsuits.

With Florida, especially southeast Florida, being the capitol of vicious dog attacks and maulings, realize that many attacks occur because their owners fail to keep the restrained, either "accidentally" or out of open defiance. Consequently, dog bites and vicious maulings by attack dogs -- resulting in hospitalization, reconstructive surgery, and all too often deaths -- occur several times per day on average just in Palm Beach county (they logged 1,381 dog attacks from 10/01/2009 to 10/01/2010, that's 4 per day, and almost five million people are bitten by dogs every year in the entire United States). Although Miami/Dade has outlawed pit bulls, officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties are unconcerned about the travesty of high numbers of people mauled and killed each year by dogs (probably because of the high number of "dog attack lawyers" that make a good living off of suing dog owners -- see search results at this link).

Some of the more dimwitted attack dog owners will try to defend themselves by stating that SoFla is a dangerous place and they need vicious dogs to keep themselves safe; what, a firearm isn't enough? Firearms do not have a primitive mind which tells them to attack humans, so they are relatively safe depending on the gun owner, whereas vicious dogs are never "safe", even for owners who are often attacked by their own dogs (for numerous examples of just how brain-dead some of these jerks are, see the comments following the article in the link below and you will notice that many dog owners of vicious attack dogs express that they do not keep their dogs on a leash, and see no need to keep them fenced in...).

We have just created this new topic, and it needs work, but we will note at this point that our intent is to document all of the dog attacks that we observe news reports on, which of course will not be all that occur, because there is not actual tracking database made available to the public. "Bad for tourism" you know...