Pit Bulls and Quarterbacks

Quarterback and felon Michael Vick's return to the NFL triggered another news cycle of interest in pit bulls -- even here at dscriber. As someone who has trained dogs and horses, I read with keen interest.

Best Friends Animal Society in Utah is rehabilitating Vick's confiscated dogs for placement with families in the coming months. While such humane ends are laudable, I remain highly skeptical about the idea of placing dogs used or bred for fighting in anything but homes with extremely capable and knowledgeable dog handlers.

It is scientific fact that aspects of animal behavior are heritable, just like physical attributes such as coat color. A herding dog, for instance, is bred for its herding instinct. Similarly, a retriever is born with the instinct to carry things in its mouth, to retrieve. In the dog fighting world, breeders selectively breed the dogs with the most "fight," an ability to attack and kill other dogs.

Of course, nurture also plays a role in how a dog develops. Fight dog breeders typically use extreme cruelty in the belief that mistreatment toughens their dogs for the ring. Dog fight breeders or trainers may also "bait" their dogs by training them with small, largely defenseless breeds such as miniature poodles. Or they may use larger dogs whose muzzles have been taped shut so that they cannot inflict injury on the pit bulls in training.

Without the desire to fight to the death, a pit bull is of no value to the breeder or trainer; this is the reason Vick was accused of killing off dogs that lacked the proper "fight."

My point is this: well-intentioned dog lovers would like the public to believe that pit bulls do not represent a public danger. They do.
To begin, these dogs are bred to fight other dogs but to be docile to humans.

This "hard wired" response can and often does go haywire, with dogs turning on their masters or attacking children. It can happen at any time in life: one of my Australian Shepherds, a breed not known for aggression, began turning on children and snapping at them while in Mexico. The Mexican children, accustomed to taunting and striking dogs, had conditioned my normally docile dog to act aggressively to defend himself. Even after a year of rehabilitative training, I do not feel comfortable allowing children to be near my normally well-behaved, elder Aussie.

In an ideal world, only responsible pet owners with means and access to professional training would adopt pit bulls. However, this has not been what I have seen. When I lived in a poor urban neighborhood in Colorado Springs in the 1980s, many residents owned Rottweilers. These were the attack dogs meant to intimidate gang members and crack cocaine dealers in my neighborhood. Of course, the gang members and dealers also had these dogs. I became known in the neighborhood as a "dog fixer," the guy who could manage aggressive dogs and train them to behave. Not a month went by when somebody did not ask me to train a dog that had bitten them or a family member -- or that was simply too aggressive to manage. I tried to work with the owners to make them understand that they needed to change their handling methods; frankly, some people were simply incapable of changing their behaviors and working with the dogs to gain mastery and control.

Visit any poor neighborhood today; this is where you will find pit bulls. People buy or adopt these dogs to project machismo. A pit bull on a spike collar leash is a statement, just like a gun in a holster. Unfortunately, most people lack the knowledge and training it takes to handle such dogs. A truly reliable attack dog or protection dog requires years of patient training and an extremely knowledgeable handler -- not just a desire to own a tough dog.

Consequently, many of these abused, mishandled, ill-bred dogs (including those rejected as pit fighters) end up in dog pounds. Visit any city dog pound and you will be astounded by the sheer numbers of dogs with the characteristic broad, square heads and stout, muscular bodies of the pit bull breeds. Increasingly, pure bred dogs such as retrievers, poodles, border collies, and the like are found in purebreed rescues and kept in private homes until adopted, leaving pounds with mutts and pit bulls -- the shunned dregs of canine society.

When you adopt from a pound, you have little or no background to go by. The dog you buy may be a former fighter and escaped before it wound up in the pound. It may have been bred for the ring or belonged to a drug dealer or outlaw biker gang member who kept the dog for protection. It may have bitten its owner or their child or killed another pet, or a neighbor's pet. (Local humane societies do their best to honestly represent the dogs, but they can't prevent the owner from lying about a dog's past nor are societies able to know an entire history).

Or, it may have been a perfectly behaved dog that somebody simply could not keep. The problem is, you don't know. And given that pit bulls and similar dogs are bred for one purpose, to kill, one really has to consider: is this the kind of animal I want to bring into my home?

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