Letters to the Editor
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sweet dogs, not so sweet dogs, and their people
My feelings on this subject are, I guess, what you could call "nuanced." Which is to say, as a young woman I lived next door to a woman who now speaks through a computerized thingy stuck on her trachea, because a pit bull tore huge chunks of flesh from her body, including her neck. She was playing in the yard with her Pomeranian when a neighbor's pit bull charged over, killed it, and attacked her.
On the other hand, I've known sweet and well-behaved pits. My neighbor down the street had a lovely, charming pit, beautifully trained.
Now for the nuanced bit. That lovely, beautifully-trained pit got out of the house somehow while he was at work one day. She was standing in my driveway when I drove up. It was obvious she was uncomfortable and felt she was being "bad" by being out of her house. Her owner wasn't around, as he had always been before when she encountered me. She was a very unhappy doggy, with head lowered and tight, nervous body language. I opened the door and spoke to her in a sweet, reassuring voice, and she didn't move a muscle. Something told me to shut the door. I sat trapped in the car while a female neighbor opened the door and wandered out to get her mail - and the dog lunged for her. She ran back into her house. Fortunately the guy who owned the pit bull got home soon after. The point being, even the sweetest pit bull may attack when it's in unfamiliar circumstances.
I've also had to run from fighting pits, when I lived in a bad neighborhood. This was a gaunt, too-frequently-bred mother and her litter of demon shark puppies. They didn't behave like ordinary dogs; they never barked. They just tried to sneak around behind you and kill you. Pit bull lovers like to quote statistics that show that many breeds of dogs bite. However, pit bulls are implicated in a larger than statistically appropriate number of FATAL attacks.
There are several points to be made here:
1) The dogs are not to blame. Obviously. They are dogs. Humans bred them. We owe them as much kindness as we can possibly show them.
2) Nevertheless, the dogs are more physically powerful than ordinary pet dogs. A savage mini poodle is not a great danger to anyone. A savage pit can do what it did to a teacher in Memphis about ten years ago - rip parts of her off, so that she died in ER while they pumped 80 units of blood into her and it literally poured right out again because there was no flesh. There are many large, powerful dogs, but few with the combination of power and instinct which makes bad pit bulls such efficient killers. We don't allow people to own pet tigers in the city, even if they are nice tigers, because a tiger which loses its temper momentarily can kill someone. Likewise, a pit bull with a momentary lapse in good behavior can kill.
3) Owners of pit bulls are divided into two categories: people who want to show off how badass they are by owning pit bulls, and people who want to rescue the pit bulls from the first type. I'm trying to think of a single exception to this rule and I can't. If you have said, "My dog is a pit bull and I leave her alone with my two-year-old baby all the time," then I'm sorry, I think you fall into the first type. This sort of person reminds me of the late Steve Irwin feeding crocodiles with his baby in his arms.
4) Here's the one no one mentions: ban pits, and you save pits from the people who fight them. At the moment the police have no recourse when they suspect someone of fighting dogs. They can't do a thing when they drive by yards full of pits unless the pits are obviously being mistreated. They can't do a thing about the pits being sold on streetcorners because it's legal to sell a dog on the streetcorner.
5) I kind of think pits are cute. There's a secret macho part of me that thinks anything that effective is cool as hell. (I also like tigers.) I'd be sad if the breed was destroyed. They have such charming bullet-shaped heads. I recently watched the movie version of "Oliver!" from 1968 and Bill Sykes had a wonderfully ugly fighting pit. I loved Bill's dog. I think the world would be poorer without dogs like him. Not everything in the world needs to be pink and fluffy and safe. Just, you know, sort of safe-ISH. Safe enough that no one ends up dead, including the dogs.
So, can we make the world safeish? Can we protect the neighbors of pit bulls, not to mention the pit bulls themselves, from the many jackasses who want to own them, and from their own inbred tendencies to mayhem? I think we can. I think they need to be registered, not just a fee someone pays, but a training course, like the course you go through here to get a carry permit for a concealed handgun. The instructors could fail anyone who was an obvious lunatic looking for a fighting dog; they could require any obviously dangerous dogs to be put down. Heck, I'd even be willing to open this up to all breeds of dogs. No ownership of a dog without taking it through a safety and obedience course. It would make all dogs everywhere less obnoxious and more likely to be well-treated by their owners.
By the way, pits were known as infamously deadly dogs before 1987. The teacher incident happened when I was in high school, and I graduated in 1986, so it was before then.
re: bookishcynic. A free society doesn't include the right to kill one's neighbors.
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some dogs are bred to kill, some aren't
Pricklypear, et al:
Yes, all dogs are aggressive sometimes. And yeah, I've been "attacked" by a Dachshund. Also a Poodle. I survived. Not a scar. You can kick that breed to the curb. However, the time I was attacked by a Rot was life-threatening.
Look, no one is saying big, aggressive, bred-to-kill dogs are evil. I'm just saying if you have a dog that's been bred to kill, treat it like the WEAPON that it is. Is that too much to ask? It's exactly like walking down the street with a pencil sharpener versus walking down the street with a machete. The potential for damage or violence is there. One might cause a hangnail, the other, loss of life. Big difference.