The stock in trade of Pit Bull propaganda is the gentle Pit Bull, the nice family dog, typically a bitch, in upwardly mobile hands eager to show her off as proof of the benevolence of the breed. There is often a nice story of “rescue,” of hints of evil circumstances overcome and a happy ending.
The nightly news stories, the newspaper headlines, the gore of the fighting pit are passed over as unfortunate bad publicity, as misunderstanding of a fundamentally gentle dog. The implication, the cover story, is that all of these dogs are fundamentally the same, simple peace loving animals wanting nothing more than a suburban home with 2.3 children where they can live with Dick and Jane, with Mommy and Daddy and Fluffy the kitten in a story book tale. The fighting pit is glossed over as some sort of mildly disreputable ceremonial sport, probably exaggerated, perhaps only a myth made up by bad people and overzealous newspaper reporters.
What is the truth ?
The truth is that there are many such Pit Bull dogs, so many that they are not even especially unusual. But the whole truth is much more sinister and complex.
It is a further truth that huge numbers, most especially the fighting stock, are innocent victims, suffer abuse, torture, abandonment and hate at an unparalleled level. Even the most brutal fighting machine is an innocent victim of the men who created him, destined himself to die in his turn as a victim of an even more powerful, even more brutal foe. The fighting pit is a never ending tale of cruelty to dogs, generation upon generation of cruelty inflicted by the pit men for their own blood lust and profit.
These dogs have been created by man, destined by breeding to suffer. For every dog who wins glory in the pit and an honored place in breeding retirement there are tens and hundreds of dogs who die in the pit. Or even worse survive to suffer the disdain and abuse of the disappointed owner, become the objects of the frustration of the pit man humiliated before his fellow perverts and stripped of his cash in the wagering of the pit, often cruelly abused and tortured before the release of death for the ultimate, humiliating sin of losing in the pit.
Real life is always more complex and less pretty than the story book. In order to understand the pit bull phenomena it is necessary to understand the statistical and probabilistic aspects of breeding, about the Gaussian curve, perhaps better known as the Bell curve.
In any population, including dogs and men, attributes such as height and weight, courage and intelligence or the speed of the race horse follow the bell curve. Millions and millions of us fall in the center of the range, are from five to six and a half feet tall, while many grow beyond six feet six inches, and a very few grow beyond seven feet in height. It is the natural order of things.
When man breeds by selection there can be dramatic results. Selective breeding has produced dairy herds producing hundreds of gallons of milk per cow and race horses with speed and endurance unknown in nature. When turned to more sinister ends such as pit fighting similar results are produced. By selecting only the most vicious and tenacious, the most “game” dogs for generation upon generation true monsters emerge.
But the principle of “regression to the normal” applies here, and when the most vicious of the game dogs are bred most of the progeny fall short of either parent and are of course useless in the pit. There is a corresponding selection in nature, and in nature those not fit do not survive. It may be magnificent in the sweep of evolutionary history, but for the individual it is more often than not a cruel, brutal and early death, leaving no progeny to perpetuate mediocrity.
In much of man’s breeding efforts many of the less fit can serve a useful purpose and have a happy ending. The race horse with less than blinding speed can become the pampered riding horse and live a long and happy life as well as wind up on the dinner table of European societies that relish horse meat.
But there is less use for substandard killing machines. The more successful pit man can no doubt sell second rate cast offs to would be pit men, pit boys as it were, eager to brag about dogs from famous lines. And there is also a sort of a fan market, men who perhaps attend and wager on fights and want to own such a dog, but who never actually make the effort to train and fight it themselves.
And the pit man himself has a never ending need for “bait,” for weak dogs for his future pit champions to maul, to build their desire for blood and victory.
What is the true nature of these rejects from the pit ring, the vast majority of the dogs directly out of fighting lines ? Even when the top end dogs, the dogs at the extreme upper end of the curve, graduate to the pit, the remaining are still dogs with an over all extraordinary level of aggression and gameness.
Yes, there are and always will be many individuals from the lower end of the curve who are harmless, manageable and affection seeking creatures of very little danger to man or beast. Such animals do sometimes wind up in companion homes, go on to live happy lives as surrogate children, infinite love sinks, become mommies little lap dog. And, indeed, some do wind up as the poster children for the nice pit bull propaganda machine.
But there is much more to it than this happy talk story. This is still a population tuned over the generations for the fighting pit, and while the dogs have been judged “curs” by the professionals, unfit for fighting pit glory, they are still substantially aggressive and perhaps even more dangerous because it is unreliability and unpredictability that has precluded them from the pit.
When such dogs find their way into middle class homes there can still be a happy ending, for they are often kept under close control and live out their lives under wraps, no real danger to society at large.
But huge numbers of these dogs find their way into less desirable situations, become the unfortunate dogs of the urban streets, tied in back yards and paraded on occasion by owners in need of surrogate manhood. Many of these dogs, while not making the top cut for the pit, are incredibly dog aggressive and can easily become just as aggressive to man or other creatures. These dogs can and do kill and maim.
Furthermore, when bred on and for the street the generations old selection for gameness, the polite word for pointless, relentless aggression, comes forth. Even when several generations removed from the fighting pit the legacy breeds through. The numbers may be less and the process less predictable and reliable, but inordinately dangerous individuals come forth in every generation.
The fact that carefully selected individuals can be raised and trained in an environment that does produce gentle pets does not belay the underlying gene pool, that these are dogs selected for a purpose, for a propaganda purpose, out of a population that also inevitably includes many potentially dangerous dogs.
There is of course another end of the spectrum. The American Staffordshire Terrier has been bred for sixty years, in instances no doubt more than thirty generations, with selection for normal and responsible dogs. These dogs are not the problem, and these lines no doubt produce good companion dogs as the norm, perhaps at an even greater level of responsibility because of conscious effort to offset the history. But these lines represent less than two thousand registered dogs a year, a drop in the bucket.
Those people who desire such dogs should be responsible and go to the AmStaff lines and support the cause of decency. Dogs bred on the street out of pit fighting lines, even when several generations removed, are inherently, by their breeding, a serious and unnecessary risk.
Yes, nice pit bulls do exist. Yes, there are enough to produce the poster dogs of the Pit Bull propaganda machines. But they are the tip of the ice burg, only part of the story.
The responsible future should be with the Am Staff, representing generations of breeding to produce a new, civil, responsible heritage. Those who insist on the Pit Bull name and insist on breeding by Russian Roulette, betting on getting the anomaly out of the breeding pool of killing sport rejects, are the root of the problem we see before us today.
Jim Engel, Copyright March 2004