On social media there are millions of videos of dogs attacking people and other dogs or cats. Some of them were captured by security cameras. Many were captured by bystanders or acquaintances with a smart phone.
And in other instances, videos of animal abuse are captured by people with smartphones. We’ve got people being attacked by dogs and people attacking dogs many of which have been videoed by somebody and the videos uploaded to social media. And that “somebody” preferred to video the event rather than intervene to try and protect the dog being abused or the person being attacked. This is an obsession with making successful social media video at the expense of acting decently.
This is a modern phenomenon which I find very irritating. It is very sad as well and we can blame the smart phone with its high-tech video capabilities and still image capture capabilities.
This is what gets me annoyed. It has become an obsession with people to stand back and observe events and video them. And of course, this is not confined to interactions between animals and people. It could be anything during which there might have been a possibility that they could intervene and help but they preferred to video the event. It’s immoral. It’s a derogation of duty; social duty.
But, then, I think that society is becoming more immoral as the years go by. I think society is becoming more fragmented and less genuine. There is less mutual support. That is not to say there are many very fine people helping others but I just sense that in general there is this loosening of the fabric of society and one symptom is the one I mention above.
A classic example happened recently in the UK. It illustrates the point. The headline in The Telegraph newspaper from three hours ago is: “I was fighting for my life against three dogs but someone just stood there filming.”
A young woman aged 24, Lakaydia Reynolds, was on her way to a driving lesson. She was confronted by three dogs that were not on leads.
She asked the owner of the dogs to take charge of them and move them away from her. The dogs attacked her. The owner was incapable of controlling them and asked others for help.
One of those others was the person videoing the attack. They obviously didn’t help. Reynolds was more concerned than before because she realised that the owner couldn’t stop their dogs attacking her. She loosened her hoodie and took it off to try and protect herself.
One of the dogs had her arm in their mouth. She tore her arm away from the dog. She realised that unless she got away very quickly that she would die.
She spent a week in hospital with nerve damage to her right arm and a lip injury as one dog had attacked her face. The lip injury required surgery. She is concerned about her arm and has to wait to see whether the nerve damage will heal. Comment: my experience of nerve damage is that nerves do repair themselves but it takes a long time.
I hope that she gets better because she says that the attack has harmed her “mentally, socially, emotionally and physically”. She can’t watch the video footage because it would bring back the trauma. But one of the worst things about the dog attack is that the person who made the video didn’t help but preferred to watch as the dogs ruined her life.
And everybody can see the attack which further hurts emotionally. She added: “The hardest thing was knowing that somebody recorded it. I thought I was going to die.”
She wants the government to do more about dog ownership. She wants licensing and more checks made on potential adopters of dogs. In general, she believes that there needs to be more rules around dog ownership in the UK.
She said: “There needs to be more rules about who can own a dog, such as dog licences. There needs to be some sort of a way of controlling who has a dog and whether dogs are trained or not.”
I totally agree with her. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. The dog owner in this instance was highly ineffectual and shouldn’t be in charge of dogs. And the bystander who videoed it acted immorally and abdicated their duty to intervene.
One of the dogs has been identified as an American Pitbull terrier which is banned in Britain. It was put down by the police. The remaining two dogs are in police kennels while investigations are completed.
The owner of the dogs contacted the police and handed in their animals to police officers. He was interviewed under caution and remains under investigation. Comment: it seems that he was trying to avoid prosecution for being in charge of dogs dangerously out of control under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, which carries a heavy punishment if found guilty.
