I recently got a request to take a pit bull mix from a rescue in Chicago; the dog has been overly protective of family members in her foster and adoptive homes. When visitors come over, she corners and intimidates them, and in one instance, she did the same thing to a member of the family she was living with; in each case, the family has returned the dog to the shelter. It's the kind of thing that wouldn't be an issue here, but I don't have the space for any more dogs (besides two that I'm already committed to taking later this month) so the best I could do was to put her on the waiting list. In the course of my email correspondence with a representative of the shelter, I learned that a pit bull rescue had chastised her for not killing the dog, because the animal's behavior was further blemishing the breed's already tarnished reputation.
There is a perception of the animal rescue community that we're all united for a single cause, and that we're all in this field with the same goals and for the same reasons. We're not. Clearly, in the situation described above, there are significant philosophical differences between various organizations: mine is founded on the principles that animals are not morally culpable for their actions and that human beings bear the responsibility for tending to the messes made by their own species; the organization in Chicago probably has a similar philosophy to a point, but if they can't find suitable placement for the aforementioned dog, either with me or elsewhere, she will be killed - something I find unconscionable; for the pit bull rescue, the breed's reputation outweighs the right to life of any individual animal.
The breed's reputation - you've probably heard people say that dogs' behavior is wholly the result of their environment, that pit bulls are unfairly targeted as dangerous dogs, or that they are loyal, trustworthy, and great with kids. The question these proponents of the pit bull's good reputation fail to ask is this: why, when there are so many larger, more powerful breeds out there, are pit bull terriers far and away the number one choice of dog fighters?
If I told you that the golden retriever is a gentle, intelligent dog and a great family pet, you would probably accept that statement without questioning it; if I told you that one of my most dangerous dogs was a golden retriever, you'd probably chalk it up to the abuse she suffered before I came to be her caregiver. People have no trouble believing that a dog breed can be developed for what we typically consider to be positive behavioral traits, but for some reason, they simply don't want to believe that a breed can be developed for behaviors we don't like so much - fighting, territoriality, predatory drives.
Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev demonstrated that foxes could be selectively bred to be docile and easy to handle, but Belyaev also bred foxes that were extremely fearful and prone to biting. These behaviors were genetic, not learned; the animals received identical treatment, but were bred only to others with similar temperaments to produce extremes at either end of the spectrum. And yet, there are those who flatly deny that this could have been the case with pit bulls and other dogs that have gained the reputation of being dangerous over the last few decades. Maybe people should pay more attention to the breed's name, the American pit bull terrier: terriers are a diverse group of dogs developed for killing vermin and for hunting and killing game; bull terriers and bulldogs were developed for bull baiting, a 'sport' in which a bull is chained to a stake and attacked by dogs; pit bull terriers were developed for pit fighting, the pit being the name of the contained area where the dogs fight for the amusement of sadists. You wouldn't market something called an exploding accidental death machine as a children's toy, so why are people marketing pit bull terriers as safe, docile, family pets when even their name says that they were bred to be killing machines?
When I found Abbie, a fighting dog, abandoned at a truck stop just north of the Grapevine in southern California, I expected that the litter she would give birth to a month later would be like any other puppies I had raised over the years. Imagine my surprise when they began trying to kill each other by the time they were three months old. They were the most fearful dogs I had ever seen (at the time) - terrified of new people, of noises, of other dogs. Imagine if you saw a cute, four month old puppy being walked by its owner, and when you approached and asked to pet the dog, it snarled and lunged at you repeatedly, bent on ripping you apart - you might assume the dog was being abused, but in the case of Abbie's puppies, they weren't. They were just born that way.
Of course, that pit bull rescue would have told me to have the puppies killed for the benefit of the breed's reputation, and I would have told them to go to hell. I don't kill animals for their behavior - I learn how to keep them safe and happy in spite of it.
So what, exactly, are these pit bull rescuers trying to do? Are they interested in saving dogs, or in saving dogs' reputations? If you have to kill all of the dogs that don't behave according to the reputation you want their breed to have, isn't that reputation a lie? Are you helping the breed by promoting pit bulls as safe and reliable family pets, when you know damn well that they have a greater chance of injuring someone than a retriever?
Any dog can bite, and will bite under the right circumstances. Smaller dogs tend to bite more, probably because they are more easily intimidated. Any dog can do permanent damage, and most dogs can cause life-threatening injuries under the right conditions, especially to children. But some dogs can mess you up a lot faster, and some dogs are a lot more likely to do so; changing their reputation doesn't change their DNA. It doesn't weaken their jaw muscles, or make them let go of another dog's throat. It just encourages people to make misinformed decisions that usually result in dead dogs.
I have sixteen pit bulls and pit bull mixes, and I love them all, but I also recognize that life isn't easy when you're so strong that you hurt yourself, when you're so full of energy that you can scarcely control yourself, and when you're so musclebound that you can't even sit down. It must be terrible when your first inclination in a stressful situation is to attack, and to have a hair trigger. For some, the answer to the pit bull's troubles is to adjust the breed standard - the set of guidelines that dictates what is and what is not a pit bull terrier. I'm not sure how that would help anything; it's been done before, and it simply results in dogs that don't meet the standard being called something else. The American Staffordshire terrier, for example - it's just a small pit bull (American pit bull terrier), the distinction having been created when people started breeding bigger and bigger pit bulls. Another problem with changing the breed standard is that it promotes breeding, and as long as we're killing half a million unwanted pit bulls in shelters every year, I don't think anyone should be breeding more of them. And finally, breed standards are physical, not psychological - changing a dog's appearance doesn't necessarily also change its behavior.
I suspect that if we saw a day when pit bulls became rare, while other breeds continued to experience overpopulation and were still being killed by the millions in US shelters, many of today's pit bull rescuers would become pit bull breeders, because deep down, their devotion is to the particular animals they wish to possess, not to animal welfare as a whole. Not me. I love my terriers, my hounds, my snow dogs, but I'd love to see those breeds all fade away in favor of the plain, old mutt, or the pariah dog that's developed independently on the fringes of human settlements for millenia - the original dog, the real thing. For thousands of years, human beings have been using selective breeding to alter those original dogs for specific purposes, and as the modern world dispenses with the tasks for which these specialized dogs were intended, all that remains is companionship, a purpose for which so many breeds are poorly suited, and the challenges of which so few dog lovers understand.
I was having trouble coming up with a closing for this piece, so I took a short break to bring in a group of dogs that had been outside playing and to take the next group out. I've come back to my desk with fresh puncture wounds in my left leg and bits of denim embedded into them, courtesy of a dog I've raised since birth and had almost five years. As is always the case, human error was to blame; my mistake this time was allowing Rosie, one of Abbie's puppies, to have brief contact with another dog with whom she hadn't played lately, but who she had always liked and to whom she had always been submissive before today. The dogs are fine - no wounds or other injuries (to them); the entire incident took about three seconds before I had them separated, at which point I was bitten. These things happen. Granted, Rosie's from a fighting bloodline; in fact most of my pit bulls aren't what I'd consider normal for the breed, but I would say that they possess typical pit bull behavioral traits, amplified. Without trying to blow my own horn, I'm very good at what I do, and today, I'm bleeding. It's something to think about the next time someone tells you pit bulls are sweet natured, good with kids, or that it's not the breed, it's how you raise the dog.
