DBP
For some reason, pit owners always wanna talk about how sweet and wonderful the breed is and what a bad rap it’s gotten. Ironically, whenever they do that, they end up validating my concerns. But I try to avoid disagreeing with them, because . . . well . . .
Because they’ve got a pitbull.
While I was in the vet’s office yesterday, a guy came into the waiting room with his GIANT (and very sweet) old pitbull bitch and started chatting me up.
Below is an excerpt from our conversation, as I remember it.
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Pitbull guy: I’ve had American Staffordshires and pitbulls for years. I’ve raised 17 of these dogs.
DBP: So what’s the difference between the two breeds?
PBG: It has to do with the way pitbulls were bred to fight and be more aggressive over the generations. But really, the pitbull is not an aggressive animal; it’s all in the way they’re trained. They’re gentler than other breeds, actually. They’re intelligent, too. They’re really smart, like pigs.
My son wanted a pitbull and I wouldn’t let him have one, because he didn’t know how to raise it. You never wanna roughhouse with one of these dogs.
DBP: So if you roughhouse with the dog, you’re training it to fight?
PBG: That’s right.
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–In my experience even the nice, responsible pitbull owners take some pride in the dog’s reputation as a fighter, and this guy was no exception. He explained to me that he liked to keep his dog in the front yard, unleashed and unfenced, because it kept the bad people away.
“She never leaves the yard,” he assured me. “She knows her boundaries.”
–Yeah, I thought, but do OTHER people know that she knows her boundaries? What about the mailman? The UPS guy? The kids walking home from school? It must seem like a ghost town on your block.
Keeping a pitbull unfenced/untethered in your front yard is not illegal. It does show bad judgment, though. It also shows a want of judgment to claim that a powerful dog like the pitbull – a dog that, for all its vaunted intelligence doesn’t know the difference between roughhousing and fighting – is a dog that’s perfectly safe for the average person to own and raise. It’s not. Strangely enough, that seems to have been exactly the argument the guy was making with me, even though he probably wouldn’t have recognized it, even if I’d pointed it out to him.
Anyway, as time goes on, it only becomes clearer to me that people who own and/or breed this dog should be subject to special training and licensing requirements.
Of course I’m not worried about the puppy in the pictures above. I know he’ll go to a good home and I know that Pamela will follow up on him to make sure he’s neutered, vaccinated, and otherwise properly cared for. Unfortunately, he may be the exception to the rule where pitbulls are concerned. His very existence is proof that there’s an irresponsible pitbull owner out there somewhere.
And how many other such owners are out there? How many times do we see this kind of tragedy repeated with pits? Pamela tells me they’re one of the top breeds to be abandoned. –Why? Because people (even the nicest people) are prone to overestimate their own capabilities, while underestimating the dog’s needs.
It’s a very sad situation with pitbulls. But it’s one that a simple law could easily change.