“It was an absolutely grisly mauling. In my 40 years of law enforcement, I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Goochland County Sheriff James Agnew said during a briefing December 16, 2017 about the death of 22-year-old Bethany Lynn Stephens. Stephen’s body showed many defensive wounds indicating she tried to fight off her own pets.
Her two dogs are brindle-colored pit bulls. Pit bulls are especially dangerous around crawling babies, which they see as weak prey, or in numbers more than one, when their inbred instinct to pack hunt can flare up suddenly and without warning. Animals that have been docile pets for years have suddenly and without any warning turned on their owners or bystanders.
Pit bull owners continue to defend the dogs against all evidence that they are dangerous not only to babies, but to their adult owners as well. The breed was designed as dog fighters, placed in pits to maul and kill one another and any other dogs or animals put with them. The fights were staged throughout the world by gamblers, and had a large following before being outlawed practically everywhere. Many dogs were killed by other dogs or even by their owners if they were the surviving losers in a fight.
Animals bred for the specific tendency to kill do not make great pets, in spite of the pit bull owners efforts to defend them.
[Added Clarification, December 20, 2017]
In response to the comments of several readers complaining about the word “eat” in the title to this article, the following was testified to by the local sheriff’s office; “We found her dogs eating on her rib cage…”
Also, some were concerned that the dogs (pictured) were not true Pit Bulls. Brindle-colored pit bulls are a true AKC breed, though differing in looks from the most common breed. [KRM]