Pit bulls kill family pet

When he found himself getting flanked by two pit bulldogs while two more pit bulls were attacking his daughter’s pet mixed-breed dog, Steve Bailey said he “sorta had to keep my head on a swivel.”

“I’d never seen a pack of dogs around here before,” said Bailey, a Parker Road resident near Dalton Municipal Airport. “I was mowing by the road when I saw them tearing down my neighbor’s driveway. They were heading for our gate (across the driveway), which I’d left open to get the mower out.”

Bailey said he scared the dogs away and got the gate closed but when he came out of the shower a while later heard a commotion in his front yard.

“They had (the family’s dog) Maggie down on the ground, so I grabbed a shovel off the porch and tried to get them off her,” he said. “She was already dying, and then they started getting aggressive toward me. I had to use the shovel to thrust at them.”

Bailey said he chased three of the dogs off his property in the incident that happened almost three weeks ago, but another wouldn’t leave. He called 911 and deputies came and shot the pit bull.

But it was too late for Maggie, a dog that had been part of the family for 10 years. She died at a vet’s clinic four hours later.

His wife, Amy, burst into tears when she started talking about the beloved family pet.

“I try not to call her when I come to feed them,” she said of her two remaining dogs. “But it’s just a habit.”

Sandra Arnett, 44, of 1035 Frye Road nearby, was cited on April 28 for four counts of having an animal at large, a misdemeanor, according to a Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office incident report for the day of the attack. She is scheduled to appear in Magistrate Court on June 10.

“We have four runners (leashes) and we have the underground (electric) fence where they wear the collars,” Arnett said on Monday. She was asked how the dogs broke through their safeguards.

“I’m not really sure, I was at work,” she said. “I came home and (the male dog) was gone. Everybody else was there, all the girls were there, we have three girls and a boy (dogs). So I went to look for him. I rode around the neighborhood and asked a couple of people (about the dog) and couldn’t find him. Some of the neighbors down the road had a police officer in their driveway, so I pulled up there and asked him had he been killed (and they said) the animal control guy shot him.”

Arnett was asked if the dogs had gotten out before.

“Not to my knowledge, as far as I know it was a one-time thing,” she replied. “Sometimes that happens, they’re just dogs.”

She said the dogs were “free to roam” on five acres around her home, and that the border of the acreage has the electric fence buried under it. “We’re keeping a super close eye on them (now). They have a baby-sitter now, somebody’s with them at home all the time now (with) my nephew, he’s 33 years old.”

But Brianna Evans, the Baileys’ adult daughter who was leaving Maggie with her parents, said the attack was not a one-time occurrence.

“These pit bulls were witnessed doing this,” she said in an e-mail to Sheriff Scott Chitwood on the day of the attack. “I drove around the neighborhood trying to sight the dogs (and found) another neighbor had just buried her 15-year-old dog. It was also attacked by a pack of pit bulls. Apparently, they killed ‘Teddy’ before coming in to get my Maggie.”

Amy Bailey said her neighbor did not want to talk to the newspaper about the attack on her dog.

“This all happened just 45 minutes before the school bus let out,” said Steve Bailey. “What would have happened if there were children in the area when those pit bulls got loose? We still have three children at home. We have concerns about them and other children live across the street that are in elementary school.”

He said he still hasn’t figured out how the four dogs got over his four-foot fence since he’d already shut the gate.

The sheriff’s office handles animal control duties for the county.

“(Officers) talked to all parties involved, (and) where the confusion comes in is the leash law requires for animals to be on a leash and if the owners are not there with them they have to be fenced in,” said Maj. John Gibson, who mentioned deputies have been to the neighborhood about the dogs “two or three times.”

“The law allows the owner to have the dog outside the property if the owner is there,” he explained. “At the particular time when the owner was cited the other dogs were on her property (when officers arrived) and in her control. The only other way we have to prosecute is to have people testify in court that the dogs were off the property. No one has been willing to do that (and) we can’t prosecute what we can’t see.”

Steve Bailey said he will be in Magistrate Court when Arnett makes her appearance.

“What is it going to take to get action taken on this?” Evans asked Chitwood in her e-mail. “If the dogs went into a fenced yard in a pack ... would they really stay away from small children? Remember, they were ready to attack my own stepfather, and he was a grown man with a shovel.”

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