Dog bites are fairly common in Alachua County, but the severity of the attacks in a series of recent maulings, including the death of a toddler Friday, is unprecedented — at least in recent decades.

Starting with Bella and her owner Linda Swinburn in September, the attacks have killed one person, injured four people, and killed three dogs and a cat.

In another case, a boy riding his bike in northwest Gainesville was injured when a dog got out of its house down the street, attacking him and killing a cat.

The attacking dogs in all of the cases have or will be euthanized by Alachua County Animal Services. Until Friday’s case, all of the recent attacks have occurred when dogs got loose from their property.

Some procedures were changed after Bella’s case to provide improved response and investigation of dog attacks but the Feb. 26 mauling at Palmetto Villas that left Lorraine Anderson with a severed ear, among other wounds, and her chihuahua Tico dead, shows that gaps exist.

The dogs that attacked her had gotten loose from their yard the day before and threatened a woman in the complex’s laundry room. She grabbed a pole in case they went for her, but the dogs ran off.

A Gainesville Police officer went to the house, saw that a table was covering a hole in the wooden fence and left without reporting the incident to Alachua County Animal Services.

“What could be different is the way we train people to think about pets. This officer who had gone to the house...the (owner) needs to know that a 100-pound dog could move that little card table,” Anderson said. “To think that (the attack) could have been prevented, God, I am a mess. I am going to have a lot of problems in the future because of this.”

Meanwhile, Swinburn said she plans to push the adoption a version of “Fabian’s Law,” legislation in Arizona named in honor of a mauled dog that carries greater penalties for owners who dogs get loose and attack other animals or people.

For instance, the owner of a dog that has a history of biting or is likely to endanger others faces a felony if an attack happens while the dog is at large. A person who does not take reasonable care to keep a dog from escaping faces a misdemeanor charge.

Nathaniel Pettiford, the owner of the dogs that attacked Swinburn and Bella, has been charged with animal cruelty and culpable negligence. Animal cruelty is a third-degree felony and culpable negligence is a first-degree misdemeanor.

“I want to have the same law passed for Bella,” Swinburn said in an email. “There are too many attacks in Gainesville and surrounding cities (that) nobody is taking responsibility for.

The owners are getting away with this and the laws need to be more strict. I will take this to the legislature and state capitol for Justice For BELLA and the others who have suffered these devastating attacks!”

Alachua County commissioners and Animal Services have made changes since the Bella case to improve responses by animal officers to aggressive dog calls on weekends.

Now, GPD is considering a protocol in which the Combined Communications Center, which dispatches for the county and for GPD, to automatically notify an on-call animal services officer when it notifies GPD of an aggressive dog case, said GPD Inspector Jorge Campos.

Under current procedures, the telecommunicator asks a series of questions of people reporting aggressive dogs. The first is whether the dog is actively aggressive and endangering people.

If the dog is actively aggressive or endangering, the call is graded as a Priority 2 on the scale of 1 to 7 and law enforcement will respond quickly. If the dog is not actively aggressive or endangering, the call goes to Animal Services without law enforcement responding.

Campos said if Animal Services officers are notified for Priority 2 calls along with law enforcement, the response can be more effective.

“Right now the on-call person doesn’t come out unless we call them and say ‘You need to come out,” Campos said. “I believe we are going to ask the the communications center that if someone reports an aggressive dog, that animal control gets notified at the same time or shortly thereafter. Then animal control can at least start tracking those calls.”

Dog bites are not unusual in Alachua County — hundreds are reported to the Alachua County Health Department every year. The reports are compiled by year, but details of the circumstances of each case are not put into a database that could be queried for specifics about the case.

However, a sampling of individual reports show that many of the bites occur in the dog owner’s home or property. The victims are typically a family member or guest, and a number of the reports explain that the bite happened during play.

So in that regard, Friday’s case is more typical but the outcome was not. The worst mauling previous to Friday’s also occurred in the victim’s home. In May 2000 a 20-month-old Grove Park boy ran up to the family’s 55-pound red brindle pit bull that was chained in the yard and was attacked. The toddler had multiple bites on his head and neck.

Dog aggression is complex and can be found in canines of all breeds, ages and genders, said Terry Curtis, a clinical behaviorist with the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine.

Whether a dog with aggressive tendencies acts on them depends on the circumstances.

“If a dog has been inside the house or in the yard for a period of time, watching people going by, that can be very threatening to the dog. So the dog gets out and it is ready to go after what it perceives as a threat,” Curtis said. “Most dogs are not attacking out of the blue. There is either a threat component to it... or a predatory component to it. It is not going to be a dominance thing — there is no dominance from dogs to people.”

Predatory action — chasing everything that goes by — is different than acting on a perceived threat. Curtis said some dogs are hard-wired toward predatory behavior.

Pepe Peruyero is a former GPD dog handler who created J&K Canine Academy after seeing stacks of euthanized dogs on the Animal Services shelter loading dock. Many of the dogs had been relinquished because of bad behavior.

Euthanasia has since dropped dramatically at Animal Services because of increased adoptions in coordination with local rescue organizations.

A direct correlation exists between a dog’s environment and how it perceives behavior that is either acceptable, situational or impulsive, Peruyero said.

“If I encourage my dog to bark at dogs when they go by, if my dog lives in a yard that is constantly taunted by kids, if my dog is tied up on a chain or a line and is lunging all day long — the likelihood of that dog building up that aggression is greater,” Peruyero said. “If you want to have a dog, whether it’s a two-pound Yorkie or a bull mastiff, you need to care for that dog. There is a responsibility. Shade, shelter, food and water is not enough. The dog should live in an environment that is conducive to its well-being.”