A bizarre incident has emerged from the state of Alabama, where 29 cats were killed as two Pitbulls managed to escape from their cages and created havoc at a dated animal shelter in the city of Dothan.
The two dogs bit through the chainlinks on their cage fences at around midnight and subsequently made their way over to a nearby enclosure where the felines were kept.
Workers at the Dothan facility and other city officials have blamed the shelter’s outdated equipment as the primary factor behind causing the incident, citing the lacking quality of chainlinks and the flimsy fences the dogs managed to break simply by pushing through with force.
Speaking on the incident, Mayor Mark Saliba remarked, ‘It’s sad, and there is no doubt that a new shelter is overdue, this is just an example of what can happen with old equipment,’ and hoping for positive retrospective action, said ‘Sometimes, tragedy causes us to move faster.’
More than just causing admonition for the facilitators of the multi-million dollar shelter and those who trained the aforementioned Pitbulls, the incident has sparked a long-standing debate about the viability of domesticating pitbull-type dog breeds in urban centers.
Though the breed is legal to own in the County that Dothan is a part of, various other adjacent administrative regions have outright banned Pitbulls from their vicinities, and now have more evidence to embolden their argument.
Others, however, suggest that, while Pitbulls might be on the more aggressive end of the spectrum when it comes to pet dogs, domesticating them properly is matter of merely putting them through a longer period of training, beyond which they retain what has been taught and rarely relapse as other breeds are sometimes prone to.
The future of the two Pitbulls responsible for mauling the cats remains undecided as of yet.