Brigette Bardot says Prince should get life in prison.
Brigitte Bardot stretched the boundaries of reality last weekend when she advocated that a bull terrier who seriously mauled a small child be given a sentence of life in prison instead of being euthanized.
“This dog should be imprisoned for life rather than be put down, Bardot told a reporter from La Voix du Nord, a local paper in Lille, France. “We have abolished the death penalty for humans, so why do we continue to apply it for animals?”
According to La Voix du Nord, 4-year-old Carmen was playing with the dog, a bull terrier named Prince, when the dog “snapped,” severely mauling the girl’s face.
The dog’s owners took the him to the animal council and demanded he be put down immediately. However, for some unspecified reason (possibility of rabies? evidence?) Prince was kept alive and is still being held at the shelter.
The mauling, which happened last month in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, made international news when it was learned that the dog had a gory past: According to a representative, the rescue did not hide any information about Prince, namely that the dog had eaten parts of its former owner’s body after the elderly man had died two weeks prior.
Bardot, who has become an animal advocate late in life, said that the mauling was “dreadful,” and that the girl “was badly injured and mentally scarred and I feel for her.” But Bardot also said the following about the dog, who is living in a kennel at animal control:
“It is living in appalling conditions and in a state of distress because it has been deprived of all contact with other animals or humans.”
Yet Bardot wants to keep it in those conditions for the rest of its life?
I’ll admit that I don’t know much about Bardot, but I found these reports a little odd:
- Bardot has “controversial views and strong right-wing opinions on immigration and homosexuality.”
- In 2008, a court fined her £15,000 for inciting racial hatred by writing that Muslims were destroying France.
- She is currently trying to squash Hollywood director Kyle Newman’s plans to make a film of her life because “no one could ever portray [Bardot] accurately on screen.”
Bardot’s tenuous grip on reality aside, one report amused me greatly: “In 2008, she said that Sarah Palin was ‘a disgrace to women’ and described her as ‘disconcertingly stupid.’”
At any rate, I have several problems with this article. First, why was the very young victim allowed to play with a large dog who had eaten his previous owner? And what was the rescue thinking in placing the dog in a home with a 4-year-old child?
Now, here’s a question I’d like my readers to weigh in on: Should Prince have been euthanized after eating his (admittedly dead) former owner? I honestly don’t know how I feel about this, so I’d love to hear your opinions.
