Pekinese Tramples Owner?

“Pussycat Mauls Cop.” Not a very likely headline, is it? Usually domestic pets don’t pose any major threat to human safety. A survey conducted in Colorado in 2007-2008 studied the incidence of dog bites. With a canine population of 700,000 in the seventeen counties studied, research found that only one-third of one percent of dogs ever bit people. Most of those were nips, of course, rather than fatalities. When it comes to safety, dogs truly are “man’s best friend.”

The case is quite different with circus animals. Unlike dogs, for example, no adult chimpanzee can be trusted in the company of human beings. When a 200 pound chimp named “Travis” escaped from his owner’s home in Connecticut last winter, a friend named Charla Nash tried to help re-capture the animal. Nash lost her nose and had her lips ripped off, sustained possible blindness and brain damage from the vicious assault that followed. Travis’ owner was also hospitalized for injuries incurred in trying to rescue her friend from the ape’s savagery.

Since 1990, there have been 43 human fatalities and hundreds of injuries from attacks by captive elephants. In the same period, there have been 25 deaths from attacks by lions, tigers and other big cats in circuses and carnivals. These are very large, powerful, wild animals, non-domesticated, and any creature of this type can be ferocious and unpredictable.

Yet when a local reporter raised safety issues regarding the “Nerger Lion and Tiger Act” with managers at the Champlain Valley Fair, he was brushed aside with the chuckle that there are probably more dog bites than lion attacks in Chittenden County.

But public safety shouldn’t be a laughing matter. And Fair officials ought to recognize there’s a difference between a tabby cat and a tiger.

Officer Jody Harvey, chief of animal control for the Burlington Police, is one person who knows the difference. Officer Harvey was key in helping pass Burlington’s ordinance banning circus shows featuring elephants, wild felines, bears and non-human primates back in 2004. She knew the police didn’t have the tactics, training, or containment facilities to handle a rampaging elephant—or a chimpanzee like Travis who tried to attack the police who arrived on the scene before they were able to shoot and kill him.

Are Essex Police any better equipped?