If you let 7 snarling pitbulls run loose and they bite, gnaw, and chew an elderly man to death, how much prison time should you get?
This happened in Texas, of course, a state populated by people with a laissez-faire attitude toward dogs and guns, but intolerant of black people who try to vote. Their cops steal from motorists passing through, too.
Their leaders run off to Mexico while their citizens die from a failed electric grid which the state refuses to tie into regional or national grids because of their weird ideas about independence (or what some call “indepenDUNCE”).
Texas is a bad state; you don’t want to drive through there, or even change planes there, much less live there.
Given attitudes in Texas, it’s not really surprising that you could be ripped to pieces by your neighbor’s vicious “pets” if you risk walking to the neighborhood grocery store. Lack of regulation of what animals people can keep fits in with their notions of “freeDUMB.”
Some more enlightened places, with more respect for innocent human life, ban pitbulls — a breed that, according to this source, represents only 5.8% of the U.S. dog population but accounted for more than 80% of the fatal dog attacks in the U.S. between 2009 and 2018.
Some U.S. insurance companies refuse to insure their owners against dog bite claims; in Canada, it’s impossible to insure pitbulls.
That’s what happened to Freddy Garcia, 71, of Fresno, Texas, on Monday, July 18, 2022 (see story here). It took a while for authorities to figure out where the pack of pitbulls came from, or who they belonged to, because the owner who either deliberately or negligently let them out — a guy named Samuel Cartwright, 47, photo above — was nowhere to be seen, much less making any attempt to control his dogs or round them up.
He’s in jail on second-degree felony charges, but can get out by posting $100,000 bond, and if convicted might be sentenced to as little as 2 years in prison.
Crystal Mason, the black woman who voted a provisional ballot, because a pollworker told her she could, that wasn’t counted got 5 years in prison.
That’s how they do things in Texas.