I hate to hear that about you cousin and hope they are OK. My nephew (14 months old at the time) got mauled by the family Lab (10 years old) of all dogs. Double whammy for my niece and her husband. Caleb hurt pretty bad and having to put longtime pet down too. I see everyones point trust me.
Thinking about children getting bitten scares me to death. my cousin is fine. That happened back in the early 90's.
As far as rescues go, my best buddy basset hound had cancer and I had to have him put down back in September. We thought about not getting another dog, but the house seemed too empty. We decided if we were gonna get another we were going to rescue. We applied to every basset rescue on the east coast and looked at their websites daily. We were willing to travel if we found the right one. Nothing stuck out to us. My wife checks little victories website about twice a week and has for some time, even when we weren't looking for a dog. She would check it just to see if they needed supplies, food, etc. She had never once seen a basset hound on there. We have been donating to them for years. About 2 weeks ago, we had just got done looking at all of the available rescue bassets all up and down the east coast. Nothing. My wife said that if it was meant for us to have another dog, the dog we lost would send us one. The next day I get a phone call from her at work. She said he didn't want us to get a dog, he wanted us to get TWO dogs. The first two dogs listed on the little victories site were two full blood bassets. One pup less than a year old and a seven year old senior. Needless to say, we felt that our buddy was sending them to us, and they live with us now. It was definitely meant to be. There was never any nervous panting or pacing, they felt right at home from the moment I got them out of the car and brought them in the house. They didn't even sniff around trying to figure out where they were, they just knew they were home.