Beginning in the early 1990’s graphic reports of Pit Bull attacks became an all too familiar feature of the nightly news in American homes. These attacks — rendered dramatic by brutality, persistence and blood — are directed primarily at the weak, the young or the old, on their own streets or in their own homes.
Dog bites and dog attacks are a devastating social, financial and medical problem
in
Large and powerful dogs are increasingly in the hands of Americans, responsible and irresponsible alike, and no sane person could deny that unreasonable and avoidable injury, pain and even death are the direct consequence, very often to innocent children. Society at large will sooner or later step in to ameliorate this crisis.
The comparison to gun ownership is compelling. The dangers of knee jerk legislation threaten the rights and privileges of legitimate law abiding citizens seeking to own and enjoy, as part of their own personal pursuit of happiness, guns and dogs alike.
Yet no reasonable person can deny that society must draw the line someplace, that it is inappropriate for people to walk in off the street, sans identification and reason, and purchase hand grenades, land mines, howitzers and large caliber guns. The devil is of course in the details, determining how large is too large and what features render a gun a weapon with only inappropriate and destructive use.
In a similar way, the flexibility and the potential of the canine genetic makeup enables man, by breeding selection, to create races of dogs with virtually any level of aggressive and destructive propensity. Clearly, here too, there must be a line beyond which society can say with reason that we must not go. Hybrid wolves no doubt cross this line, and at some point dogs bred for pure aggression must pass the elusive line of unacceptability.
The mantra of the canine community has been to oppose legal solutions based on the perceived breed of dog, breed specific legislation, and to endorse the concept that it is only the behavior of specific dogs, rather than their appearance or breed identification, that makes a dog unacceptable, makes it appropriate to restrict or eliminate it.
This strategy is proving in practice to be seriously flawed, with the gravest potential consequences for the canine community. For the pit fighting advocates have through clever manipulation much too often managed to divert attention from the crisis they have created, maneuvered us into effectively endorsing their cause of promoting the legitimacy of pit fighting. They chant that we must stand together, least your breed be next. But this is disingenuous, for by such reasoning the Mafia could demand the unthinking support of the Italian American community and neighborhood gangs of hooligans could hide behind identification as the people of the neighborhood. By luring us to their cause the potential exists that many good and responsible people and dogs will be swept up in knee jerk solutions by a society acting, through the legislative process, out of impatience and anger.
Breed specific legislation can and should be generally opposed on the grounds that it is prone to be unfair in application, ineffective in achieving its purpose, by it’s nature putting undue power into the hands of arbitrary government employees and bureaucrats all too often seriously deficient in practical knowledge of aggressive dogs. As a generality most of us rightly oppose it.
But the pit fighting lines are in reality not a breed in the conventional sense,
but rather a criminal conspiracy with an illegal base serving the masters of
greed and pandering to the lowest levels of society.
The problem of course is to identify those dogs and those lines in which the gameness is at a level to be a serious danger to the public, the people the dog is going to come upon when it breaks loose of owner control or is simply abandoned on the streets.
The dilemma is that the words "pit bull" mean so many things to so many people in so many contexts. There are no pit bulls in the AKC, that is, no AKC registered pit bulls. While various registries have come and gone over the years, the vast majority of the dogs whose sellers and owners think of as pit bulls are of essentially unknown origin. Many of these dogs are far removed from game lines and diluted through selective breeding for less fighting propensity. Indeed, many have become mixed so as to become more or less harmless, more or less equivalent to any other random bred dog living a simple life as a loving companion. The problem is that many people with two or three "pit bulls" in the back yard really do have dogs that upon escape go on a hunt and destroy mission, attack a child and persist until a police officer finally ends it with his gun.
How do we deal with this? How do we identify, segregate and remove the dangerous dogs without confiscating and destroying thousands of innocent dogs who are in reality simple companion dogs to ordinary people, people who love and care for their dogs like everybody else ?
The problem for the canine community is that sooner or later society at large will determine, through their legislative processes, that the right of the individual citizen to freedom from attack on the streets trumps the right of peaceful dog ownership, decide that if nothing else can be made to work the only solution is the eradication of any dog which looks like it might be a fighting dog.
Emotional campaigns against breed specific legislation are in and of themselves ineffective and counter productive; unless the canine community can put forth real solutions and enforce self discipline to ameliorate the problem, legislatures will step in and take drastic, breed specific steps, as we have seen in places like Denver and Ontario.
When cancer invades the body then difficult decisions, among options differentiated only according to the degree of risk, are presented. Pit fighting dogs and many of the derivative lines loose on the streets are such a cancer, and the alternatives for the canine community may well evolve down to a choice between removal and attempting to live with it.
Support for elimination of such dogs, identified as a specific breed, may come to be seen the most wise and least risky policy. Thus there is much public support for the eradication of the pit fighting dogs, on the basis that as a class they are such a perversion and inherently so dangerous that society has a legitimate need to eliminate their existence in the population at large.
The difficulty, as usual, is where to draw the line. Clearly, at one end of the spectrum, there are dogs perhaps only distantly related to the actual fighting dogs in responsible homes, of relatively little danger because of their nature and environment, and security imposed by the owning family. At the other end of the spectrum are the dogs sold directly out of fighting lines for illegal purposes such as impromptu street fighting, protection of drug activities and as agents of terrorism in the wrong neighborhoods.
Although the Pit Bull receives the most notoriety for incidents of death and mauling, especially on a per capita basis, in recent years other breeds, such as the Rottweiler, have had prominent roles. Indeed, fatalities can and are caused by incidents involving all dog breeds and the population of dogs with unknown background. Dogs are fundamentally domesticated wolves and the dynamics of the wild social structure are just below the surface of every dog.
The consequences of the enormous upsurge in popularity of the Rottweiler in the 1990’s, driving the breed to the top of the AKC list and putting upwards of 100,000 Rottweilers a year on Americas streets, has created huge problems for the breed and for the canine community at large. No reasonable person could deny that too many of these large, powerful and aggressive dogs have fallen into the wrong hands. And it would be most foolish to deny that there is an element of irresponsibility in the German Rottweiler establishment, pandering to the lowest elements of American society. Dogs which have attacked judges in the German show ring have been banned in Germany and then sold to gullible Americans, in one case resulting in the death of a child within weeks. The Rottweiler problem is immense and serious, but is driven in fundamental ways by huge numbers and the rapid growth rather than the criminal elements of the age old American canine community.
Reaction to the wave of Pit Bull attacks has brought forth immense publicity and the resultant pressure on politicians and public officials to “do something,” to take concrete steps to bring relief. Never mind that the Pit Bull hysteria is fundamentally a side show to the drug culture and oppressive social conditions in the American urban underclass; people, driven to some extent by the press, want to see action, see something done. And politicians under pressure are quick to do the obvious. Are Pit Bull attacks a problem for our voters? Well then, the solution is quite obvious to our politicians, they will simply make the Pit Bull illegal and create an oppressive force of bureaucrats and enforcers to isolate or eliminate them.
But there are always unforeseeable consequences of such an emotional driven approach. Just as gun confiscation proposals most easily target peaceful citizens going about their lives, whose guns are no real threat to society at large and which do provide a real enhancement of home security, breed elimination is most easily focused on the ordinary citizen whose dog is no real threat. There is much more than a grain of truth to the inflammatory slogan “When guns are illegal only criminals will have guns.”
Breed
specific legislation, the societal restriction, or in the ultimate case eradication,
of a specific breed tends to be a meat cleaver approach to the problem; leading
to hysteria, abuse of ordinary citizens and unlikely to address either the
problem of Pit Bull attacks on the streets or the underlying social maladies.
Simplistic solutions to complex problems almost always are ineffective and
produce unexpected and undesirable consequences while offering little relief,
as prohibition of alcohol in
But at the end of the day, the fundamental fact remains that the pit fighting lines are different; kill and maim on a nation leading level while remaining numerically small in number, on a per capita basis, and will likely remain the leading canine man slayer on the American scene for the foreseeable future. The brutality is exacerbated by the style of the attack, so often mauling and mutilating the body, adding to the aura and the macabre news clips and newspaper head lines. Difficulty in identification of the mutilated body is too often the Pit Bull calling card.
Pit fighting has deep roots in rural
Prior to the current crisis, Pit Fighting and Pit Bull dogs in
The genesis of today’s crisis is the emergence of the pit dog from the private rural underworld to become the status dog of the worst elements of urban America, the drug dealers, the gang societies, the urban criminal and quasi criminal elements and garden variety punks and bullies. Now the purpose is often to flaunt the dog, to push it into the face of all who would disrespect the losers of American society. Those who are failures in every aspect of pathetic little worlds can through the flaunting of a pit bull gain the illusion of importance, power and respect.
The traditional rural pit fighting dogs attract very little attention because they are valued assets kept carefully out of sight. The low population density minimizes casual contact with the general public and the purpose of the dogs – participation in organized, formal pit fighting – renders them so valuable that they are maintained and fought with the greatest attention to security and secrecy.
A great deal of mythology has been built up about the nature of those participating in the pit fighting game, especially in the rural south of years gone by. These "Pit Men" are portrayed as good family men and the dogs living with the man and his family as real companions. The fate of the losing dogs is always a little murky, but no doubt some went to happy homes just as the "pet quality" show dogs become companion dogs. Somehow these dogs were trained without the use of smaller and weaker dogs and other animals for "practice fights," kind of like the high school football team. In a similar way, we are told of up scale contemporary big city dog fights where the atmosphere is gentile; the participants include professional and business men. The dogs are very carefully matched as to weight and condition and an actual death in the pit is an unusual occurrence. There is no beating or torturing of the losing dogs, at least on the premises, and much effort is put into the maintenance of a "sportsman like" aura.
Such things do in fact exist. I have talked with a number of men describing these kinds of situations from personal experience, and their words ring true. But the problem is that this is just like the myth of the content slaves of the south, well cared for and loved by the white masters, living peaceful and fulfilling lives. The reality is that the proportion of fighting dogs living as cherished family members is no doubt similar to the proportion of happy, contented slaves. If things were so good for the slaves, why did they have to send out the men with the dogs and drag them back in shackles ?
The migration of the fighting dogs to the urban streets was the advent of a new era. Since the reason for acquiring and keeping such dogs is to threaten one’s peers and victims and thus gain “respect”, it is necessary to flaunt the dog on the streets, to dress up and parade. And, naturally, it is necessary to have an occasional killing or mauling to lend credibility to the game.
While not on parade, while sleeping off last night’s drunk or waiting for the welfare check, the dogs are kept carelessly, chained in a back yard or loose in an insecure fence. Being a society of transient gratification, fighting dogs eventually lose their novelty and are given away, escape or are abandoned to fend for themselves.
Thus the fundamental difference between the Pit Bull and the other breeds is that pit fighting is not some exaggerated myth, some ancient primitive degradation. Pit Dog fighting, the ritual combat for gambling and entertainment, is a widespread and persistent part of American life, indeed, in large elements of our society, condoned or accepted.
There is only one purpose for the Pit Bull Terrier: fighting in the pit so as to win money and glory for his breeder and his owner. While other breeds evolved with diversity in purpose, served varied roles, the Pit Bull was bred generation upon generation for one purpose only, to prove his “gameness” in the pit by fighting until the foe dies in the grip of his bite, or, to the shame of all involved, quits short of death.
The hard core Pit Bull advocate believes that the fighting pit defines the breed, that “game” is the essence of the heritage and that it can only be proven and maintained in the mortal combat of the pit. In their heart of hearts it is victory in blood that proves gameness in the dog, and the right to perpetuate the race through breeding.
“Game” is the primary code word of the pit fighting culture. While the word is often passed off to outsiders in the nice dog propaganda as meaning “sporting desire” or “courageous” or used to place the breed in some other admirable context, the reality is much more stark and brutal. The game dog is the one willing, no eager, to fight to the death without reason, an irrational fixation that overcomes reason, pain and ultimately the threat of death to fulfill his ultimate purpose, the reason for which he was created by man, to die so that those in attendance can gamble and vicariously share the brutal experience of fighting and death.
In the world of the American Kennel Club, there is no such thing as a Pit Bull. Beginning in 1936 they created the “American Staffordshire Terrier” more or less out of thin air and began registering the Pit Bulls under that alias. Clearly, this was an early manifestation of “political correctness” and in this instance the AKC approach has proven to be both wise and pragmatic.
While most pit bulls on the street are without actual registration or papers, those who cling to the Pit Bull moniker and register their dogs generally do so through the United Kennel Club, a distant cousin of the AKC willing to take in those unwilling or unable to find a niche in the AKC family.
Many dogs maintain duel registration, that is have both AKC and UKC papers. What is the meaning of this, what is the motivation for this duel existence? Are these dogs the canine version of the Ku Klux Klan, shopkeepers, tradesman and farmers during the day and marauders in white robes at night ?
Indeed, the entire “legitimate” fighting dog community, those who seek a place in the sun of polite society, are held in the unrelenting grip of a fundamental paradox which in the end may well prove insolvable. On the one face of the coin, they present a persona that abhors (or pretends to abhor) the pit fight as an inhumane relic of the bad old days. But on the flip side of the coin the Am Staff people can never quite let loose. Indeed, according to their club web site:
“The extraordinary vitality of this breed is a direct result of breeding for successful fighting dogs.”
There are really only two logical conclusions to draw from this. Either the dogs must fight in the pit one way or another to maintain the breed or they must admit "replica status," that is dogs which only pretend to the mythical "extraordinary vitality" of their fighting precedents. Kind of like the street cars of the sixties and seventies, with the racing stripes and wings on the rear deck but nothing under the hood.
This is an impossible dilemma. The most fundamental principle of canine breeding is that working functionality, be it draft work, retrieving, police work, hunting or fighting in the pit can only be maintained when the breeding stock of each generation is certified by performance of the work of the breed. In the long term, the only really viable solution is to create new or modified lines with contemporary utility and new names to reflect the new persona and reality.
The AKC show line German Shepherds are a new breed, incapable of police work. The show and pet line hunting dogs have lost the intensity, drive and character necessary for success in the field. The real hunting dogs, protection dogs and herding dogs are confined to those lines bred and maintained by purists who persist in breeding primarily according to the individual performance of the work of the breed, with selection for physical attributes secondary to performance. In the end, form must follow function, as the founder of the German Shepherd said.
You simply can not maintain working character if you do not do breeding selection according to excellence in the claimed work of the breed.
One way or another, the non fighting “Pit Bull” is a paradox, fundamentally a deception. Either it is a fighting dog with immediate ancestors proven in the pit, or it is just a left over dog called a “pit bull” without the “extraordinary vitality” or gameness of the fighting stock.
Even those who deny that fighting is the essence of the breed, but who cling to the name “Pit Bull” instead of adapting the much more neutral and less frightening moniker “American Staffordshire Terrier” almost invariably in their heart of hearts glory in the fighting prowess. They may deny it, even to themselves, most importantly, to themselves But it is there.
Apologists tend to portray the pit fight as some sort of ceremony, an elaborate ritual where death is not of the essence, where the noble spirit can be proven in a gentile and sporting way. Where one dog can “scratch” or quit and the fight is over, where death is not a necessary outcome but only an occasional unfortunate result. People do, after all, die in our boxing rings, on our high school football fields and on our highways; such sad events are the inevitable collateral damage of a fundamentally valid activity.
But there is a fundamental distinction. High school football and our interstate highway system serve legitimate purposes, and a small occurrence of serious accidents are an undesirable but unavoidable and continually lessening collateral consequence. But the infliction of injury is the fundamental purpose and attraction of pit fighting, along with professional boxing and hockey, rendering these activities morally abhorrent to decent human beings.
A peculiar component of the nice dog spin doctor propaganda is that the Pit Bulls were bred only for fighting, not for aggression to man. Never mind that another part of the propaganda claims that they were general purpose farm dogs too, and the specific references to, in the words of the Am Staff club, “guarding the homestead,” which certainly must imply an aggressive to man potential.
Indeed, promotion of the Pit Bull terrier as a personal protection dog and the flaunting of the man aggression in the police style sports are seen by most traditionalists, the actual men still engaged in old style pit fighting, as a major part of the problem. In their view there is only one place for the pit dog, in the pit, and flaunting man aggression is seen as the folly of the ignorant newcomer.
As an enhancement of the “bred to fight dogs, not to bite men” mantra, the claim is made that in the pit fight the dog that bites a human being, that is either handler or the referee, is disqualified in the pit, loses the fight. I submit that this is a matter of training and focus on the other dog. The dog does not bite the handler because he is part of his social circle, his personal pack structure. The other handler and the ref do not appear, from the films and tapes I have seen and what I am told, to be in general close contact.
The basic fact of the matter is that the pack structure coming down from the wolf progenitors provides the explanation for the observed and expected behavior. All dogs and wolves naturally divide the world of living creatures into pack members, accepted, cooperated with and loved for those willing to attribute that emotion, and outsiders, enemies to be kept out of the pack territory and driven off or killed when they encroach.
This is why the Pit Bull, even those actively trained for and participating in the fighting, can be and are un aggressive to human beings in their family. Although I do not have personal knowledge, I would speculate that even the fighting dogs, or perhaps some individuals, could be acclimated with other dogs and get along with them to some extent. ( In general I would assume that isolation is the normal practice in the training regimen.)
Thus the dog bred for strong instinctive fighting response, whose sole purpose for existence is to attempt to kill any unknown dog placed before him, can be expected to convert this “gameness” to an unknown human being relatively easily. This is proven with the ease with which dogs are utilized in the business of drug production and distribution.
The very evolutionary factors that cause the dog to be so trainable and useful, the social structure of the wolf pack, are the reasons that the dog does not strongly differentiate between other dogs and human beings in establishing his interpersonal relationships. If his heritage is to fight any strange dog before him, it is an entirely reasonable expectation that this basic drive will also manifest itself as aggression to an unknown human being.
Indeed, the whole basis of the defense, the claim that pit dogs were only bred to fight other dogs rather than man, is absurd on the face of it. We know, after all, that a very common initial phase in the development of the most brutal serial killers is the child who kills or mutilates small animals.
The pit man is alive and well in
In response to societal repugnance at his activity and existence, opposition to breed specific legislation has become a personal mantra, the shield to deflect attention from his perverted life and ugly underground world. Euphemisms are a stock in trade; “Game testing” is just another code word for pit fighting, as if somehow changing the words could cleanse the reality.
Let us not shirk from the reality. Pit fighting is not some dainty little formality, it is a fundamentally violent activity whose primary purpose is entertainment by way of the infliction of pain and death, and the associated gambling. A stack of mutilated dog carcasses is often a feature of such events, like used baseballs after the game.
Much of the complexity and difficulty we face today is due to fragmentation as the dogs of the fighting pits emerged from the historical rural roots into various urban and suburban social strata’s. Incidents highlighted in the press and on television have been by and large the dogs in irresponsible hands, the gangs, the drug culture and the neighborhood toughs.
But the dogs of the pit also have also been taken up by elements of the middle and upper classes, more upwardly mobile, often female, more uptown or suburban and more sensitive to the perception of society at large.
And there is a difference in the dogs as well as the people. As the pit dogs have been bred — mostly for quick and easy money — for sale to the public at large the strong selection on the basis of fighting success has faded into the background. Any breed with a demanding purpose, be it hunting, sled pulling, police work or pit fighting, must have breeding selection done relentlessly, in each generation, according to demonstration of success in the work. When this is not followed then the character dissipates. Indeed, the American bred German Shepherds of the AKC show ring are a pathetic caricature of their heritage, insecure in spirit and devoid of serious working potential. Yet German Shepherds from serious European lines continue to produce excellent working dogs, because they have been breed according to their work and according to the principles of the founders of the breed.
The pit bulls bred without pit testing quite naturally have much reduced fighting
potential because unworthy dogs, dogs who would have died in the pit or been
eliminated in training, are bred and contribute to the gene pool. This does
not necessarily make more gentle or reliable dogs, but simply introduces instability
and unpredictability into the lines. Thus the loose cannons we see on the streets
of
A vocal set of apologists passionately devoted to “saving” the Pit Bull has emerged from the more middle class owners of such watered down dogs. Their pitch is that these are just good dogs who have somehow fallen into bad hands. These spin doctors are a complex phenomena, for while their emotional commitment tends to be genuine, existing in the safety of their remote middle class suburban and uptown worlds, there is always the undercurrent of fascination with the fighting dogs.
But nobody in the ghetto or on the streets suffers from such illusions, for they know the Pit Bull from fear, fear of attack on the streets, fear of devastating injury, fear of the people and the dogs, fear of violent death.
The spin doctors, far removed from the fighting and the violence and thus personally safe, tend to be emotionally driven. Very often Pollyanna style “all of god’s creatures are good” people, they desperately need to prove, often by keeping “nice” examples, that Pit Bulls are really no different, are truly gentle creatures unfortunately only led to evil by evil people.
A standard spin gambit is to put forth the case of the nice little lady whose dog truly is virtually harmless, but who insists on calling it a "Pit Bull" literally bragging that it's only real original purpose was to fight. Surely, they say, this is the real pit bull, a poor misunderstood victim of vicious propaganda, misunderstood because of the exaggerated transgressions of cousins on the streets. Do not this dog and this lady merit our consideration, our sympathy ?
I say she merits zero sympathy. If she is caught up in the hysteria, she should look back and see that she brought her problems on herself by insisting on the name “Pit Bull.” Words do matter, and those who flaunt the image have no one but themselves to blame when they get lumped in with those who actually have the dogs.
Although the spin doctors take pains to present a socially respectable persona there is often another aspect, another face. At a deeper level they tend to revel in the belief that their dogs, living exemplarily lives as suburban family pets, could spring forth at a moments provocation as the ultimate attack machine, like Clark Kent morphing into Super Man. It is the street level “my dog is tougher than your dog and if you doubt it meet me in the alley” syndrome dressed up with the trappings of a more gentile class. Strangely enough these personas easily coexist, morphing from one to the other with hardly a moment of transition.
In the big picture there is really no such thing as a “good” Pit Bull person in that the responsible people eschew the provocative name as well as the pit fighting genesis. The only truly relevant variation is in the thickness of the veneer of pseudo respectability. Many with the nice, nice facade are in the beginning simply naive or driven by some variation of the "all god's creatures are good" fantasy.
It is of course true that there are many dogs, more or less distant from the actual fighting lines, that are workable as companion animals and represent no serious threat to society. The spin doctors often present the case that "the REAL pit bulls” such as these dogs are entirely different from “the backyard-bred, mindlessly aggressive, abused, unsocialized and temperamentally incorrect ones you may read about in the paper."
But dogs we read about in the papers are real too, the Pit Bulls of the streets, fighting rings and back allies of Chicago and elsewhere. These dogs are not imaginary creatures but modern urban terrorists.
Let me assure you these
Pit Bulls are most real for the parents of children run down and killed on
the streets of
Should we ask that woman who had the gruesome task of identifying her friend if she thought that perhaps they were not “real” pit bulls ? Can anyone think they could drive down from their distant suburban home and explain to her that it is OK because they were “imaginary,” an aberration, and that she should harbor no resentment or fear of the “nice” Pit Bulls ? Can anyone think she would like to meet one of the nice dogs, that that would somehow make everything OK ?
The spin doctors emphasize
that these evil things are “not done by me or my dogs,” and they are in many
ways correct. But by serving as cover for the pit fighters those who
insist on retaining the “Pit Bull” name have a share of the responsibility.
As an explanation, think of a hypothetical group of young men who formed a
social club and chose to call themselves “Child Molesters.” Suppose further
that they rented a club house someplace on Main Street in your town, put up
a sign for the world to see and applied to march in the local parades under
their obnoxious banner, right in front of the high school band. Journalists
would no doubt rise up in a spasm of righteous indignation and cheer lead
a local campaign, demand that somebody “do something.” Yet these young men
would no doubt explain that while they enjoyed the name they themselves did
not actually participate in such things; that they just liked to relate to
the historical concept, the exciting vision. Certainly they would claim to
only enjoy the thrill of the distant association, but go no further. They
would have no doubt that they were within the letter of the law, and perhaps
they would be.
Why should society look upon people who insist on calling their dogs “Pit Bulls” and thus glorify pit fighting for entertainment any differently than a group who chose an obnoxious club name?
Some will say “but Pit Bull is an old and honorable name, and I will not give it up.” But just exactly when did the words “Pit Bull” — standing for ceremonial fighting for entertainment — become honorable because of long usage ? How long would it take to make a "Child Molesters Club” noble too? Thirty years? Four hundred years ?
Many will find the words “Child Molester” as a social name obscene and reprehensible,
as they are, but others with equal validity find the words “Pit Bull” and the
visions of blood and gore, the exploitation of the ceremonial infliction of
death for the pure pleasure of it, equally obscene and obnoxious.
In
In a similar way, the elimination of the pit fighting lines and culture is coming into focus as a social necessity, for when the last real fighting dog dies then the American phenomena of pit fighting, associated gambling and other related evils will also come to an end.
All canine organizations need to follow the lead of the AKC and not recognize or permit the participation of dogs with the name "Pit Bull" because that literally means fighting dog and is so perceived by the public at large.
The canine community needs to support policies which lead to the ultimate elimination of pit fighting, the maintenance or propagation of strongly game lines and the use of the “Pit Bull” name. Those dogs in situations where they are of negligible danger to the public and not participating in or contributing to pit fighting or the glorification of the heritage need to be left in peace.
Certainly those who desire to keep and maintain dogs out of fighting stock, and are willing to fundamentally change the nature through breeding selection, training and security — and adapt an appropriate name — are deserving of the opportunity do so, entitled to their own personal pursuit of happiness. But in order to merit our indulgence they need to act in good faith, to be truly committed to changing both the underlying reality, the “game” characteristics of the breed, and the public persona.
In Europe many of the serious protective heritage training and trial systems,
such as the Royal Dutch police trials ( KNPV) and the
Ring sport organizations specifically exclude the bull breeds as inappropriate
for the work and an undesirable association. In a similar way, men with specific
kinds of criminal records are also precluded from the KNPV trials. In retrospect,
we see that there is great wisdom in this. In
The fundamental problem with opposition to breed specific legislation is that the Pit Bull people have been very clever in manipulating the decent elements of the canine community, have been successful in using us for cover, have put us in position of de facto participating in their evasive strategies and maneuvers.
Many rescue and humane organizations will not place a pit bull or a dog with that appearance, and there is a case for making this universal. We need to separate opposition to breed specific legislation from implicit support for the pit fighting phenomena and remove any confusion from the fact that "Pit Bull Dogs" as originally created and "Pit fighting for entertainment" are ultimately opposite sides of the same coin.
When those who propagate and promote fighting dogs, and those who only hang around the edges and glory in the reflection, finally bring down the kind of reaction we see in Europe we need to prevent them from using the canine community as a whole for cover.
At the end of the day, the fundamental reality is that the
words “Pit Bull” mean killing dog to the public at large, and there
is no place for such dogs in modern society. How to eliminate these actual
fighting dogs and this culture with minimum disruption to the rights and sensitivities
of the people involved is a complex and many faceted problem. The canine community
as a whole needs to be — and be perceived as — a part of the solution rather
than just a narrow, self serving pressure group. The level of dog bite injuries
existing in
Breed specific legislation tends to be ineffective, often unfair and insensitive in application and unwise policy. But the need to bring an end to actual pit fighting dogs and the associated culture is a higher need, one that the canine community can not ignore or deprecate least we be seriously and permanently damaged, lose fundamental aspects of our personal rights in the onslaught of reactive, emotion based legislative solutions.
Jim Engel, Copyright August 2007