If a Pitbull Kills Someone Should the Owner Get the Death Penalty

Let's say you're the best animal trainer in the world. There's plenty of circus guys who've gotten killed by a tiger.

All right, Tim, the question for today's episode is, if a pit bull kills someone, should the owner get the death penalty?

Yeah, you know, the reason we're doing this episode is because recently a pit bull killed five-month-old and a two-year-old, and we've been seeing more and more frequently stories in the news of pit bulls who are killing, you know, children, old people.

I mean, I remember a story that I saw where a lady was jogging with two pit bulls, and both the pit bulls killed her and ate her, essentially.

Jeez.

So, yeah, I think, yeah, there's, I think Allie Beth Stuckey is an individual who's brought a lot of attention to this topic in general, and basically describing them as vicious murder dogs. And so I think one of the arguments she made was that, you know, sheepdogs shepherd, and retrievers retrieve, and, you know, pit bulls essentially murder people.

So, so, but I do think, you know, you do have to ask the question when you're thinking about something like this. You have to ask the question, how many times does this need to happen before we realize that maybe pit bulls are a little bit more aggressive than other dog breeds?

I think, you know, if you actually look up the statistics about dog attacks, pit bulls are far and away the leading dog that is gonna attack people or kill people, and it's not even close. I mean, they basically, there's more pit bull attacks than, you know, all the other breeds combined almost.

And so it is a significant problem. And then if you're trying to answer the question, what do we do about that? I think you have to go to the Old Testament law and see, you know, what does the Old Testament law say about a scenario like this?

Because there are scenarios, as you read through the Old Testament law, that are somewhat comparable to this. And I think we have to think through some of those things and try to give a answer about what do we think should happen in a scenario like this.

The Ox That Gores and the Owner’s Liability

So, you know, the primary, I think, passage that comes to mind is the one in Exodus 21, where it talks about an ox who is basically accustomed to gore. So there's two kinds of scenarios. So Exodus 21, 28 says that when an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable.

So it's basically, as a general rule, if an animal that you own kills someone, generally speaking, all other things being equal, the individual in question is not going to be held guilty.

Responsible, yeah.

Well, I guess not responsible. Yeah, guilty, guilty.

Yeah, well, yeah. So, but then, you know, the next verse, though, says if an ox has been accustomed to gore in the past and the owner has been mourned but has not kept it in and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned and its owner shall also be put to death.

So you have, you know, the first scenario is it just happens out of the blue. You can't control everything that an animal does. But then, you know, on the other hand, if this ox has been known to gore in the past, then you're in a bit of a different situation because at that point, then you can be charged with negligence.

And so what undergirds both of those laws, though, is that, you know, as when you invite people onto your home, into your property, or the people that you're caring about, you have some reasonable standard of doing, there's some reasonable standard of protection that you're charged to essentially follow or else you're going to be guilty of what happens.

So I think what's difficult, though, is, you know, in the scenario of the ox here, you have a scenario on the one hand where it's never happened before, you're not gonna be held guilty, but if that particular ox is particularly aggressive, then you're gonna be held to an account.

But then that is a very unique situation and then you have to ask, well, how do you extrapolate from that general principle laws that are reflective of different kinds of scenario? Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah.

Dangerous Animals, Roof Parapets, and Reasonable Safety

So imagine, like, for instance, that an individual would keep a lion in his house. Now, you're not really allowed to do that kind of thing in most states, but if you were to keep a lion in your house and someone comes over and the lion eats someone, you can't say, like, well, you know, the Bible says with all animals in a simplistic way, it's just a one strike and you're out.

All right, you get one warning sign and then you're good, right?

Across all animals, yeah. If you have a lion, for some reason, that feels different than saying, hey, you've got a beagle, right?

You got a beagle, right? Because, and what the difference is that you have an animal breed that is particularly violent and particularly aggressive and, you know, what happens in your mind is you think, well, this is a little bit different than the ox kind of scenario.

So with the ox kind of scenario, you know, you don't have, like, man-killing ox. Like, every ox is not a man-killing ox, but some can be a little bit more aggressive than others. And so then you have some sort of standard, but then if you were to imagine, though, you take that ox into your home and make them a pet, right?

Someone comes into your home wearing red, right? I think I'm wearing a red shirt right now. Someone comes to your home wearing red, the ox, you know, the bull charges and impales them and kills them to death.

That would be a bit of a different scenario than having an ox on your property somewhere who does that kind of thing. So, like, the issue, though, is what undergirds it all is this idea of a reasonable standard of safety.

And that's what you find when you think about what's happening in Deuteronomy 22 .8. So when you build a new house, you shall make a parapet or a fence for your roof that you shall not bring the guilt of blood upon your house if anyone should fall from it.

So in that scenario, you have a different policy than the ox policy. In that scenario, it's not a, well, if someone dies the first time, they tripped accidentally, who could have known, right?

Right, yeah.

In that kind of scenario, what you have is you have a reasonable standard of protection to say that if you invite someone over to your house and, you know, they hung out on the roof, particularly at night, and someone slips and falls and dies, their blood's gonna be on your head because you put them in an unsafe situation.

So you can imagine this with different types of animals. So I mentioned, like, the idea of if you have a lion as your pet, it eats someone. Even if you had a bull as a pet and it ate someone, you would be in a different, or it ram-charged someone and impaled them and gored them to death.

In your home, where they're not expecting, that would be a different kind of scenario. So you're putting someone in danger. If you had a snake as a pet, like a poisonous snake, like if your house, you invite someone over your house and you have a bunch of poisonous snakes crawling all over your house, and they bite someone and kill them, no one is gonna look at that and say, well, that's the same as, you know, just the dog out of the blue who just so happened to go crazy or something like that.

I don't even know who's going into the house with poisonous snakes everywhere. If I know there's poisonous snakes, I'm not even going in that house because I know that something bad is gonna happen out of that.

That's right, that's right, right. So no one would voluntarily enter into that scenario, but then if you were to invite someone in that scenario and as they walk in the door, they're greeted with a bunch of snakes who strike them, it would be kind of like a surprise.

But everyone would think that would be attempted murder, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's just like borderline comical to even think about. It's so unsafe and ridiculous.

Yeah, so, all right.

Well, that or the alligator pet or something like that.

Yeah, well, hey, you know what? You laugh about like exotic pets, but I remember, I think maybe last year or maybe it was two years ago, there was a football coach for, I think the University of Texas whose wife or girlfriend or something had a pet monkey and it basically like bit the face off of a child, I think, if I'm remembering right.

And it's like, everyone was kind of looking at that situation and saying, well, why did you have a monkey? Like that's not, I think it was a smaller monkey, but generally monkeys are still considered to be like pretty aggressive unless they're highly trained, you know?

Right, right. So, I mean, like we have a category for this. If you put someone in a situation like that and they do what animals do, then you're gonna be held liable for it because you're putting them in a situation that is just abnormal and it passes like a reasonable standard of safety.

So, in the ox scenario, what you have is you have a reasonable standard of safety being applied to an ox. And it may be that it's so infrequent that you don't have to worry about it that much, but you do have a pretty severe one strike you're out kind of policy.

But you can imagine other scenarios where like, if you don't build a fence at all, you don't have the government stepping in saying, you have to build the fence or else you're gonna get fined. You just have a situation where if you don't build a fence and someone trips one time, you're, you know, death penalty kind of issue.

And that's the problem. So, when you look at this kind of scenario, the issue entirely revolves around how dangerous really is this animal, this pit bull. Like, should we consider the pit, like, should we consider it more like the lion or a wolf or something like that, right?

Should we, or a snake or a bull pet in your house or something? Should we consider it more like that or is this fairly domesticated? That's the point. And like the answer, so then, you know, now what people assume is just because it's quote unquote, like a domesticated animal, that we're all good.

But the problem is that that isn't entirely self-evidently clear, you know? So, like, if the bulk of your animal attacks are happening from a pit bull, from pit bulls, then it may be that at some point you say, hey, maybe we've categorized this animal wrong.

Hey, and by the way, just out of curiosity, I pulled up the statistics for it. And this website, I won't put it up on the screen. I don't have it set up right now, but it's from Fooey, Chelly and Lee, injury lawyers.

And it says pit bulls are responsible for the vast majority of fatalities associated with dogs. From 2010 to June, 2021, there were 430 fatal dog bites with 185 of those coming from pit bulls and another 41 that were pit bull mixes.

And then it says the top three breeds responsible for fatal dog attacks were pit bulls at one with 185 deaths, pit bull mixes with 41 deaths. And then number three is Rottweilers with 26 deaths. So there's a pretty big.

Give me the first two. So the first one was 100. And what?

185 for a pure breed pit bull.

Pit bull mixes was what?

41.

41.

So I mean, basically like almost half, half of them are all coming from.

Yeah, yeah.

From pit bulls, pit bull, pit bull mixes essentially. Yeah, I mean, that's crazy. So I mean, at a certain point you just say, hey, now, I mean, I don't know how many pit bulls are being owned throughout the whole United States or whatever else.

It's still relatively a rare phenomenon and the internet can exacerbate this kind of thing. But at a certain point though, you say, well, have people been warned about the nature of this breed, right?

Just like you might be warned about the nature of an ox. Like, so yeah, have people been sufficiently warned at this point and at a certain point, like I think what you should do is you shouldn't outlaw pit bulls.

I hear people saying you should outlaw pit bulls. I don't think you should outlaw pit bulls. I think what you should do is just say, I think there's a real live debate to be said of like, has this animal crossed the threshold of safe and should we just change our perspective of it in general?

And consider it to be on more of a dangerous side and basically say, hey, if you wanna own it, that's fine. But if it kills someone, you get death penalty because this is no longer reasonable. So we thought for a while it was reasonable.

Now we don't.

Now we have the numbers to sort of tell us, right?

This is a bit different than the other ones. I mean, it's obviously different, you know? If it's accounting for half of the fatalities, give or take of all dogs, this is into a different cat. It may be that this needs to be put in a different category and we need to start treating it differently.

Government Opposition to the Death Penalty and the Pit Bull Debate

Yeah, and I guess part of the complication with a conversation like this as well is just the fact that our government is really opposed to the death penalty in general, right? And so part of what's hard about the conversation is just the fact that there are a lot of pit bull lovers out there, right?

Pit bull defenders who would obviously probably disagree with us. And unfortunately, maybe even, maybe numbers probably wouldn't even convince them, right? But then the other difficult part is just the fact that there's a lot of people who might not even be invested in the pit bull conversation one way or the other, but then they are opposed to the death penalty no matter what.

And so I think that's another complication here with what, I don't know that I see many people saying, hey, we need to, maybe you see these kinds of people, but I don't normally see people saying, hey, we need to start talking about death penalty for people who have pit bulls that kill people.

Well, I'm suggesting a way forward. I haven't heard this way forward yet, but I mean, what was interesting about the scenario that just happened, as much as it can be interesting, like a horrible situation along those lines, but what was interesting about it was that the dog, it spent 10 minutes killing, but this isn't the interesting part, but the dog spent 10 minutes killing the five-month-old and the two-year-old.

But what we learned about it after the fact was that apparently the dog had bitten the wife in the past, from what I understand, and she was asking the husband to get rid of it, but the husband wouldn't.

So that would be clearly like the, that would be like clearly the straight up application.

Right, yeah.

Like put the pit bull conversation aside, just inherently because the dog is a pit bull, the dog is attacked more than once.

Right, so if that's true, then that would be the straight up application of that principle. But I'm trying to say that there's more to the principle than that, like there's more to it than that, and what it assumes is a reasonable standard of safety.

But then I think a lot of people, what's frustrating about the conversation is that once you describe it as a dog, then people put it in a man's best friend kind of category, and because it's a domesticated dog, and then they can't conceive of the fact that dogs have different natures, and that's what's really frustrating is that it's like there are nature factors into this.

It's not just a matter of nurture. You can be the best animal trainer in the world, and like say you're the best animal trainer in the world, there's plenty of circus guys who've gotten killed by a tiger, right?

Because nature matters, and just to say that just because it's a dog and it looks sweet or something, that it can't be more like a canine of a different type, a wolf or something, that's just naive. It's naive the way that animals work, and so nature might be factoring in to this kind of discussion in a fairly significant way, and I would just say that hey, if you wanna defend this dog to death, I mean to the death, no pun intended, I mean you can, but I mean I think at some point, at some point we need to have a reasonable discussion about like all right, if you wanna own the dog, you own it, but if it kills someone, then are you that confident that this is a nurture problem and not a nature problem?

Are you that confident that you're gonna stake your life on it if it goes that way? And if it were a snake, we would expect them to stake their life on it, right? If it were a tiger, we would expect them to stake their life on it.

If it was the rampaging chimp or something, we expect them, we should expect them to stake their life on it. So animals are not, they do have a nature and sometimes that nature is hostile.

Closing Remarks and Podcast Sign-Off

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