Owner of Injured Dog Speaks Out about Attack

"They chewed him up pretty good.  Got him on the neck and the chest and because it punctured his lung the air when he tried to breath in would get under the skin, but on top of the muscle so he was all bloated and inflated like a balloon," says Brad Sumner.   

Sumner owns the dog that was seriously injured when two neighborhood pit bulls, that are usually friendly, attacked around 10:30 Thursday morning. He says "This whole thing could have been over a bone that one of them wanted, the other said this is mine, and I mean it could have been over anything." 

   He says he doesn't know if his dog, Gaidin, started the fight or the other dogs, but one thing he does know is the attack could have easily been prevented.  He says, "The only thing I can think is that I didn't click it on just right and it was loose enough so that he was able to get loose."  So his dog was loose when he wasn't supposed to be as well as the pit bull and pit bull mix from down the street that attacked.  Officials say they were fenced in, but dug a hole to get free.  Sumner says he's just as much to blame as the other dog owners.   "In the end things like that happen.  I don't have any ill will toward them," he says.    Instead, Sumner says he feels gratitude and sympathy for the other dog owner, who not only helped save Gaidin's life by rushing him to the vet in the back of her pick-up, but also made the hard decision to immediately hand her dogs over to authorities to be put down.  He says, "I feel badly that that is the action that had to be taken ... I looked down and saw these two dead dogs and I thought what a waste of an animal that was probably loved in its own family and licked kids faces and was just as important to other kids as this one is to mine."  He says he is going to be extra careful from now on to make sure Gaidin never gets loose again, and he hopes other dog owners learn from this incident to do the same.