Two weeks ago, Chris Bethel witnessed something that left him shaken. He was on a late evening walk with his wife, Liz Chiarello, in their Tower Grove South neighborhood when they heard a woman screaming. Bethel ran to help her—and encountered three massive, unleashed bully-style pit bull mixes attacking the woman’s much smaller dog, Daisy.
A biotech founder, Bethel still isn’t sure what compelled him to jump into the melee and try to fight off the bigger dogs. It was pure instinct. “When I got there, all three of the dogs had grabbed onto the victim dog, and the woman was trying to pull her dog as hard as she could by the leash, but the three dogs had, like, pinned the victim dog and were just latching onto her,” he recalls. He forced one dog off, then grabbed the other two by the scruff of their necks and tried to detach them. Then the third dog pushed his way back in and latched onto Daisy again.
“So I’ve got two pit bulls in either hand, and I’m holding on for dear life, and they’re lunging to try to grab the dog again,” he recalls. “They’re snarling and trying to get out of my grip.” It took Bethel shouting for help, and a third neighbor putting one of the pits in a sleeper hold, before they could contain the situation. (And even then, Daisy was left with some serious injuries.)…