A 92-year-old woman from Moscow’s Eastern District was mauled to death by her own bull terrier. Why the hell did the old lady get a bull terrier? Even if it was a very old bull terrier, that means she got it when she was around 75 to 80. Not exactly the best age to get a bull terrier. A turtle would have been a better choice.
Really, dogs like that should simply be banned in Moscow. I have a dog myself, but a small one—a French bulldog. Even if he went crazy (or I went crazy and drove him insane), he still wouldn’t be able to tear anyone apart or kill them.
There’s also a family living on the floor above me. They got a female Rottweiler. For a long time she was sick—very sweet, gentle, and frail. Everyone loved her. My Snoopy used to chase her around the yard. Then the Rottweiler recovered and turned into a huge monster. She obeys the man—the head of the family. But he can’t always walk her, so sometimes his wife does. And it looks like this: she spots someone else with a dog (say, me), plants her feet on the ground like a water-skier, grabs the leash with both hands, and cries out pitifully: Please hurry past! While you’re “hurrying past,” the Rottweiler goes berserk, lunges at the leash, barks, and so on. And at that moment an interesting thought creeps into your head: “One day she won’t be able to hold her.” You start frantically trying to remember what you’re supposed to do if a big dog latches onto your little one. In the neighboring entrance (apartment block section), some guys have a Doberman. Their apartment was burglarized twice, so they got him. And they deliberately made him aggressive. To call him a monster would be an understatement. I’m not afraid of dogs, but I keep my distance from that brute. To be fair, the guys handle him responsibly: he’s always muzzled, always on a short leash, and only the man walks him, and only early in the morning or late in the evening. Still, there’s nothing pleasant about watching that marvel drool through its muzzle. Why, exactly, am I supposed to put up with that? Dog owners often start shrieking that all these people just don’t know how to handle dogs, that they need proper training, and then even an American bulldog will turn into a sweetheart. Naturally, they follow that up with examples from personal experience (I leave my three Staffies with a one-year-old child and they feed him with a spoon, that’s how adorable they are) But I’m convinced there are hundreds of thousands of Staffies, shepherds, Dobermans, and in general dogs weighing more than 12 kilograms (26 lb) in Moscow, while the number of people who know how—and actually want—to train them is in the thousands. So it turns out that any one of us can tell a story along the lines of “there’s a psycho dog living in my building.” Or, even more often, “some idiots in our building got a shepherd.” There’s no way to establish any real control over how these dogs are bred, distributed, and kept, no matter how much dog clubs talk about it. Everyone knows how dogs get passed around: - oh, let’s give this one, the one with the funny face, to Aunt Zina - but Aunt Zina doesn’t like dogs - She will. How could anyone not love such a little darling? A year and a half later, that “little darling” will eat Aunt Zina or her neighbor. And don’t even get me started on teenage idiots—wow! all the dogs and kids in the yard are scared of my Pincher! you should’ve seen how he tore apart a cat once! There’s nothing more to say. It seems to me that about 30 percent of fighting dogs are bought by exactly that kind of degenerate.
So my view is this: if you want a big dog, get the hell out of Moscow. Better yet, out of any multi-story apartment building. Move to a detached house in a village or settlement, and there, behind your own fence, you can keep even a crocodile if you like. It’s a real shame that the initiative in the Moscow City Duma (Moscow’s city parliament) to ban large dogs in Moscow didn’t pass. But sooner or later, it will happen.
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