WHY is the breed so relevent in all this publicity?!?!?!?
Does it matter what breed it was IMO- NO!!!
Any dog big/small-sweet/vicious should not be left alone with a child. Any breed of dog could do this its all about the up-bring of the dog. The media just love to cause a stir I just wish little ol'me were important enough to do something about it!

This is a comment to the recent Rottweiler attack in which a baby died.

"Unless we're going to take the step of saying that a family with a child isn't allowed to own a dog, it seems to me the law is unlikely to be able to rule out every possible tragedy of this kind"
Patricia Hewitt, health secretary and Leicester West MP

So how i read it is-they wont change the law because they would have to ban every dog from every home which has children.Seems about right to me,but perhaps they should be educating people on how to socialise and train their dog at the very least.

as well behaved as ben is around kids, i wouldnt leave him in the same room as my grandson, more for bens protection, my grandson is a demon for pulling at the dog his tail/ears, putting his arms around the dogs neck. he put yogurt all over a JRT the other week , so its the owners not the dogs.

Media hype again - they've gone to great lengths to eek out an attack like this coz it's a scoop at the moment after the recent attack. There will be more to come I'm afraid, day in, day out now You know what these journalists are like nowadays! Grrrrrrrrrrrr I'm very angry! This attack is only about 8 miles from where I live too! It's gonna be plastered all over the front page of our local newspaper I expect - I'll let you know on that one!

lol poor dog
I many years ago now noticed my GSD was doing alot of head shakeing turned out in a moment of blindness my son whos is now 16 but only a toddler then had been trying to get rid of the veg he was meant to eat and had managed to insert two garden peas up his left nostral
and the dog would have let him do it again had I not noticed
they loved each other and were inseprable but you can take that for granted

So sad for rottie and dog owners alike, I never even realised there were so many people who despised dogs until the recent incident with the baby, but this will just fuel them even more.

In the tragedy with the baby, the dogs were guard dogs, and to them, that baby was an intruder. It wasn't a resident there as her parents were looking after the pub, they didn't actually live there. As sad and tragic as it is, they were just doing their job, and it could have been a dog of any breed trained to guard.

The sad thing is-i saw on sunday that my local rehoming shelter has five Rottweilers in their care at the moment and all this bad publicity now will ensure they stay there longer because people will walk right past their kennels instead of giving one a chance.

ps.I still would like another Rottie,but the only one which was suitable (could live with another dog & a girlie) was sadly reserved,but atleast she's going to a new home.

truly awful for all concerned including the dog.

I'm not looking forward to what's going to happen...we are in for some knee jerk legislation...

Definitely agree. I would never leave mine alone with babies or children, mine could easily hurt a child by accident just because their size and they play rough. Also if I had a small dog I still wouldn't leave it, cuz then the dog can get hurt too as well as the kids. I would just never leave any animal alone with children, both kids and animals need supervision.

It's very sad that children have been killed and hurt in these attacks and I do feel sorry for them and their parents.

I have to agree that the breed of dog is irrelevent, any dog is capable of turning and attacking. When I was a toddler, my grans yorkshire terrier bit me!

Rottis are lovely dogs, but it seems it's going to be their turn to be demonised for a while as the press moves on from SBTs. Why do the papers never ask what we've been asking - where were the owners? Who was supervising the dogs? My dad's always said there are no bad dogs, just bad owners.
I would never leave Gizmo alone with a child, or with an adult he didn't know.