Welcome!
I am in London to! The girl was most likely scared that her dog would be taken away if you had reported the incident. While there are a lot of great people here that are fine with pits, we do get a lot of ‘looks’ and rude comments, which I thinks puts a lot of pit bull owners in constant fear of loosing our dogs, however, there is no excuse for this owner running off like that. If you see the girl again, tell her that you do not plan to report this (if you don’t, that is), but you feel it is only fair that the vet bill get paid. If this same situation had happened to me and I was asked to pay the vet bill instead of having to deal with ACC, I would pay it in a heart beat.
JP is correct, there are no bylaws here that require pit bulls to wear muzzles. If the incident were to be reported to Animal Care and Control, there would be an investigation, an Animal Control officer would actually go to the owners house and meet the dog to see if the dog is in fact aggressive. If the dog is deemed aggressive, the owner would get a muzzle order issued by the city.
Anyways…I hope this can be resolved and I just want to say that its great how your are handling the situation. With all the bad press this breed gets, it’s nice to hear from someone, that’s not a pit owner, actually be open minded and not just assume that all pit bulls are aggressive and mean.
