Letters to the Editor
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I'm So Lucky
I wake up every morning and say to myself, "I'm so lucky." This is because laying on the floor next to me is my beloved pit bull, wagging his tail and smiling at me.
My pit bull has truly been a gift. Having come off the streets of LA, there were people who told me it would be safer for me to have adopted a crocodile, but my dear sweet dog has proven them all wrong.
My dog has taught me how to live in the moment, how not to hold a grudge, and most importantly, what it's like to experience prejudice. As a white female, I really had never experienced this before, but since I adopted my pit bull five years ago, I've learned what it's like to have people make cruel remarks based solely on your ethnicity (breed), move to the other side of the road, and refuse to sit next to me in a public park.
I recently tried to purchase a new townhome so that my dog could have his own outdoor patio, but was denied by the home owner's assocation due to the alleged breed of my dog. This was despite the fact that I had provided information on his registration with the city, certificate of formal training, references for my current home owner's association, vet records, and a statement on his good nature from his professional dog walking service. Yet no one seemed to care that the most violent dog living in the building was a Jack Russell Terrier. Apparently, our society finds it acceptable for that particular breed to bark constantly and nip at anyone that comes within their path.
Unfortunately, racism is alive and well in America.
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How about making the owner legally (criminally) responsible for the behavior of the dog.
If I take part in a robbery and my partner kills a cop, I am charged with murder.
If your dog terrorizes, maims or kills another person, how about if we charge you with assault, manslaughter, or even premeditated murder if you never bothered to train your dog and it had a history of violence.
Are you okay with that Ken?
Are you okay with that as an alternative to breed specific legislation? If I owned a beagle or a labrador, I would be okay with that.
If you can't do the time, don't let your dog do the crime.
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pits are bred to kill and should be exterminated
why are such rivers of ink being spilled in order to deny the simple and established facts that pits
are an artificially created breed, not a naturally occurring species,
are bred to kill
are unpredictable
do enormous damage very quickly when they attack
and can never be made safe?
Pit bulls and ALL other breeds which were
ARTIFICIALLY BRED TO BE KILLERS
SHOULD BE BANNED AND EXTERMINATED.
People attempting to replicate such breeds should be jailed.
All the rest is gibberish from emotionally unstable blabbermouths trying to impose their EXTRAORDINARILY DANGEROUS habits and preferences on others.
That is not supposed to happen in any civilized society.
By the way:
pit bull lovers are holding something back in their nauseating little confessions:
if you can love a pit, you can love something a LOT LESS DANGEROUS, so there is something else going on here.
Pit lovers - who never hesitate to impose their diatribes on the public - should at least be honest enough to tell us what that is.
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The puppy picture is just the first sentimental rhetoric
I get that people love their dogs. That's not a surprise to anyone. But at this point in the essay, Foster begins to show his lack of any evidence (beyond his anecdotal love for his dog) to justify his thesis:
"Self-appointed experts will tell you that fighting is in the blood. And dogfighters use this cliché to support their "sport." It would be cruel to keep them from fighting, they say. Yet if fighting were purely dictated by genetics, there would be no need to feed dogs gunpowder, insert glass shards beneath their skin, or to engage in any of the other cruel forms of "training" in the underworld of dogfighting. And if it were true that pit bulls, through their bad breeding, are prone to unexpectedly attack, the streets of New York City would be littered with victims of its estimated 300,000 pit bulls. It is easier to believe that the dogs are somehow to blame, rather than their human counterparts. It is easier to point to faults in the DNA."
That's just weak reasoning. To say that pit bulls are not a product of selective breeding which chose the most aggressive and dangerous physical and psychological elements of the breed, just doesn't make sense. This is why we don't breed wolves as housepets. And torturing the animals is just a way to make those aggressive predispositions fiercer, not necessarily to create them.
The reason 300,000 pit bulls have not gone on a rampage and killed thousands of NY citizens is probably because the vast majority of owners are responsible and recognize that for all its intelligence and personality, the truth is their loving pet could potentially be a very dangerous animal under the right set of circumstances.
All breeds of dogs have their particular traits which have been nurtured and enhanced. Greyhounds run. Jack Russels kill rodents. And pit bull terriers were bred to fight.
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Re:
"How about making the owner legally (criminally) responsible for the behavior of the dog."
I thought that is already the case.....
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A little naivitee ...
In my small circle of friends, two people have been attacked by Pits.
In both cases, the owners begged forgiveness, and swore up and down that the dog had never shown any sort of aggressive behavior before. (Neither dog had a record, although in both cases the owner pleaded with the victim to avoid filling one. In one case, cash was offered to avoid an official record.) And yet, here we are, two hospital visits later.
So I'm sorry but I don't buy the "it's only bad owners" logic.
Pit Bulls are not the only kind of dog which can be dangerous. And, obviously, any dog can be made more or less dangerous based on how it is treated.
The violence in Pits is very close to the surface, and loving, companionable, social dogs can snap. To claim that Pit Bulls are just misunderstood, however, is a little naive.