BADRAP member killed by her pit bull

Darla Napora was killed in her home by one of her dogs and found hours later by her husband. She was killed by her pet pit bull. Darla and her husband supported BADRAP, a pit bull advocacy group. BADRAP has declined any interviews about the incident, but they have made a post on their blog regarding the incident, which looks pretty awful for them. They claim responsible ownership makes the dogs harmless; if their own members cannot manage it then it is difficult to know how members of the general public should be trusted with that task. Darla's husband has made some chilling statements (which I will return to), but I want to address the intellectual sloppiness that BADRAP tackled the incident with. The response is difficult to dissect, it contradicts itself over and over and in multiple ways. It is almost as if they generated every possible response (outside of admitting that there could be a genetic problem with pit bulls) and put them all in the same post in the hope that one would stick. They must think the audience is too stupid to compare the argument of one paragraph to the next, because none of them agree.
The whole thing is totally incoherent. I don't envy Donna Reynolds in having to respond to the incident, but I don't pity her for displaying such a glaring lack of integrity.

They open with a story about the Donna Reynold's (non-pit) dog and how it gave her cues to stop messing around instead of just snapping unexpectedly. She continues:

Reality check: My dog is an animal, not a little person. I mean, I know he's not a little person, but his teeth in that moment offered the full reality that - Oh yeah - I'm getting an 85 pound dog super amped and the only way he can tell me to stop would be to correct me, much like a dog would correct another dog who was being overbearing. "Stop!" Elliot showed considerable restraint by pulling short of a stronger correction, but what I really wanted to thank him for was revealing the blessed beast that lives inside every house pet dog. I wasn't with my house pet in that nano-second; I was with the primordial wolf who knows his strength and his boundaries. Elliot is most decidedly an animal before he's a dog, and he's a dog before he's a house pet. Yep - Got it.

I've fallen back on that lesson several times this past week as the media prodded at the dog related fatality in Pacifica. He's an animal before he's a dog, and a dog before he's a pet.

Keep the italicized portions in mind when you read the next bit, which appears later in the same article:

The week before Ms. Napora died, a pregnant woman in Milwaukee, Sharon Staples, was shot to death in the street, in the presence of her 13 year-old son. Police arrested three teenaged boys in connection with her death. There are over 20 million teenagers in the United States. What will the investigation into the death of Sharon Staples tell us about teenagers?

Are teenagers animals first? If not, why bring them up? The article compares pit bulls to humans right after saying that they are animals first and not at all like little people. BADRAP and other pit nutters will say the dogs are a lot like humans or not at all like humans, depending on what serves them best at the time.

I want to return briefly to the first portion I quoted- if you read it again, you notice that it implies that there was probably something that Darla did (or did not do) that caused the attack, hinting that she probably loved the dogs too much and treated them like little people instead of animals. Donna once again changes gears and instead of dogs being animals first and unpredictable as being a reasonable explanation for the attack, she begins to speculate that it is really a freak accident that cannot be comprehended or explained, as if nothing like this has ever happened before with pit bulls:

This particular case is making investigators and onlookers absolutely crazy because no one can figure out what really happened.

Yes, the dog (Gunner) was a large unneutered male, but that alone does not give us the answer. In nearly all of dog related fatalities, we get a roadmap of several messed up circumstances that typically lead straight back to the whys of each tragedy. (KC Dog Blog's Road Map) Not in the Pacifica case however. Final forensics reports may or may not reveal the key to the incident ...Was there a physical abnormality such as a brain tumor in the dog? A pregnancy related fainting spell? (Darla was pregnant) ... but at the end of the day we have to accept that we may never know what triggered the incident.

We can add "fainting" to the list of pit bull attack triggers, and if that it isn't it I guess living in your home or being pregnant count. They pretend a dog needs a brain tumor in order to display aggression, or some other far flung theory to explain the accident. This directly contradicts the point in the first paragraph about the nature of dogs as animals. BADRAP and other pit nutters will say that all dogs are animals and can attack OR you have to do something to make them attack, depending on what serves them best at the time.


All the arguments that are mentioned depending only on what serves them best at the time are very telling. You can be sure that you are dealing with liars or fanatics when they cannot admit any flaw in their position and decide to lie to avoid addressing any hard questions; there is no such thing as a problem-free political position. Being able to admit problems that make a solution imperfect (as all political solutions are) is a mark of honesty and integrity. The message is less attractive to people more invested in their feelings than facts, which explains pit bull advocates and their behavior (in general) very nicely.

The article tries to downplay the death of Darla as irrelevant due to its rarity, which can be illustrated in the following quote from the post:

Even as we share the grief of Ms. Napora's family, we do well to keep two things in mind. First, serious incidents involving dogs have always been exceedingly rare, though they generate news coverage that creates an impression they are more prevalent than they actually are. There are roughly 78 million dogs in the U.S., and 308 million human beings. Annually, there is one dog bite-related fatality for every 10 million human beings, and every 2.5 million dogs. Second, official reports may shed some light on the unique calculus of an incident; but they are never a basis for generalizations about all dogs, or even one kind of dog.

Unfortunately for BADRAP, none of the critics of pit bull advocacy really care about the rarity of these incidents. They care that the incidents are PREVENTABLE. Deaths that cannot reasonably be prevented by legislative or social measures are of little concern to anyone as a political cause. Knowing your loved one died and did not have to, that someone could have prevented it and did not, is the problem that people have with groups like BADRAP giving the impression that there is not any added danger to any kind of dog in particular.

The post compares the deaths to random acts of violence (and puzzlingly suggests that there isn't anything that can be done socially or culturally about the violence), when there is a much more apt and understandable comparison available to them. The instant that a product for consumption is shown to cause sickness, injury, or death a massive recall effort is put into place to prevent death. When hamburger patties infected with e. coli were recalled there was no need to assume that every single piece of recalled meat was infected (the equivalent of thinking every pit bull is dangerous or will kill). What people actually assumed, rightly assumed, was that the safety of the product was questionable. There was not a practical way to tell who would be safe and who would not. Precautions can be taken by consumers, and should be, but that is not a good reason to release tainted products without warning. Someone could die who did not have to, so the only moral thing to do was to pull the product from the shelves. The logic behind this is difficult to attack- when children and baby products kill someone due to a defect (even one that isn't likely in the rest of the released product), no one argues against recalls. Unfortunately the pit bull factory is pumping out way more units than anyone can reasonably care for, and groups like BADRAP are against any legislation to restrict the breeding of the dog. Groups like BADRAP also fight against any warning to potential dog owners that there may be special risks or precautions associated with certain breeds of dog, for fear that pit bulls will be even less adoptable and more of them will die (which is tragic, but their solution to the problem seems to be making things worse rather than better).

If you were Darla's husband, wouldn't you be angry at the way they have talked about the death? Even if you didn't blame the dogs or think BADRAP was lying, you may get peeved at their insinuations about the fault of humans in attacks or their failure to neuter the dog. Her husband seems a lot more concerned about the image of the breed than anything else. Instead of the standard plea for privacy during a media-circus death, he pleads for something different:

Greg Napora and his family have asked that people please avoid implicating a breed type in this incident. After all, Tazi is a pit bull. He told me by phone: "I really wish I knew what happened, but at the end of the day, Gunner was an animal." There it is again. The fact that he still loves his dogs is probably the greatest but hardest to understand lesson of all.

The ashes of the dog that killed Darla will be buried with her, and the dog that did not kill Darla will return home soon. This is what fanaticism looks like.