For pit bull, it’s guilt by association

By Darrell Laurant

Published: March 12, 2008

BEDFORD — Spend five minutes with Prince, and you know this dog is a killer.
A killer of stereotypes.
Sure, if someone tied you down and set this dark-brown pit bull mix on you, Prince might lick you to death over a couple of hours. But he wouldn’t mean to.
“He’s just a lovable dog,” said Lois Holland, his owner. “He loves everybody.”
Actually, Prince’s amiability shouldn’t be a surprise. Most pit bulls aren’t vicious, any more than most Italians are gangsters or most inner city teenagers are drug dealers. The rogue minority gives the overwhelming majority a bad name.
Lois’ husband, William, no doubt knows that, intellectually. Yet he also has seen the line between dog and human violently crossed — putting him in the hospital for nearly two months — and he’s no longer sure where that line is. Or if it even exists anymore.
Now, that has become Prince’s problem. William Holland finally came home Wednesday to a dog he can no longer trust.
“He didn’t come right out and say that,” Lois said, “but our granddaughter was coming to visit me, and he said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave her alone with Prince.’ We’ve had him for four years, but we’re going to have to find another home for him. So far, we haven’t had much luck.”
The four dogs that attacked the 62-year-old Holland on the late afternoon of Jan. 15 weren’t wild dogs, or even strange dogs. They belonged to his sister-in-law and typically roamed the bucolic country neighborhood off Burks Hill Road in Bedford County.
“He walked past them all the time,” Lois Holland said. “We all did. They were never known to bother anybody.”
According to Lois Holland, the incident happened when her husband was heading up to his mother’s house, on foot, past his sister-in-law’s trailer.
“He said, ‘I’m going up the hill to have a piece of cake,’” Lois Holland recalled.
Moments later, the younger pair of the four dogs — all pit bulls — approached Holland and began jumping on him. Then, they got rougher, and the two older pits rushed in and piled on, teeth flashing. Somehow, no one knows why, the game had suddenly turned mean and terrifying.
“We’ve wracked our brains trying to figure it out,” Lois Holland said. “He’d just eaten lunch, and maybe he had a food smell on him. We don’t know, but if he hadn’t had a knife on him, they’d have probably killed him.”
Instead, Holland managed to fatally wound two of the dogs with the knife, and the other two ran away. (They eventually were captured and killed.) He was left bleeding badly from multiple injuries, including a right foot that his wife said “was just about eaten off. All the tendons were showing.”
Holland had to be airlifted to Roanoke for trauma treatment. Surgeons saved his foot, but they couldn’t do anything about the trauma to his psyche.
For the record, Prince isn’t a pure-bred pit bull, although he has the broad chest (the dog weighs 80 pounds, said Lois) and the blunt muzzle.
“We think maybe he’s part black lab,” said Bev Jordan, a local dog enthusiast who has been helping Lois Holland try to find Prince a home. “That could be why he’s a little more mellow.”
Prince had nothing to do with the attack on her husband, Lois Holland said.
“He was in here on the floor, asleep,” she said.
Nevertheless, Prince has to go, and the Hollands are hoping he can be adopted by some dog-lovers. The worst-case scenario would send him to the local animal shelter, quite possibly to be euthanized.
“That just wouldn’t be fair,” Lois Holland said.
The legal and insurance issues surrounding the attack are still being sorted out. The fact that it’s all among family makes it stickier.
Bev Jordan tried to take a photo of Prince while I was at the Hollands’ house, but he rolled over on his back and hid his face with his paws.
Who could blame him?

- For information on adopting Prince, contact the Hollands at 586-6610.