A link sent to me by a friend served as a reminder that there is a culture war raging in this country.
Over a particular breed of dog called the “pit bull.”
Supporters of the breed are called “apologists” or “pit nutters.” Not quite the same rhetoric is directed against anti-pit-nutters like this crackpot, but that’s the nature of culture wars.
This “war” has all the elements. Lower classes create the problem. Middle classes worry that it might “spread” to their neighborhoods and kill their children. Upper class hipsters own the same dogs that are seen as causing the problem and howl in protest. Libertarians inveigh against government heavy-handedness while communitarians fret about “the children.” Liberals and conservatives tend to want government solutions for different (but often disturbingly compatible) reasons. And of course, gruesome images live on forever on the Internet.
Reminds me of gun control and the drug war.
As to my own view, it’s admittedly quite personal. Anyone who wants to kill my dog is my enemy.
(That’s how wars start, doh!)
Comments
12 responses to “There’s a Ph.D. in this”
You’re right that this is a culture war writ small with all the same elements as the other culture wars.
You can take entire arguments right from the gun control debate, et al, and find them repeated in the pit bull debate.
And there are those of us who don’t want your dog dead but rather prefer that people not make unsupportable claims and let their sentimentality stand in the way of frank discussion and accurate assessments.
You don’t have to worry about your neighbors killing pit bulls. Your city and county government is doing that. All over this country, dog pounds kill thousands of pit bulls every month.
At the Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond pounds; nearly all the dogs there are pit bulls or mixed breeds that look like pit bulls. Very few of these dogs get adopted, and you know what happens to the ones that don’t get adopted.
My dog is my responsibility. Other people’s dogs are their responsibility. Guilt is not transferable by genes, and there is no collective responsibility.
Unfortunately, many believe in limiting the right to own dogs based not on any action by the individual or that individual’s dog, but on statistical claims and breed theories.
Fascinatingly, animal control workers are now publicly admitting that they are lying about dogs’ likely genetic backgrounds in order to save the dogs’ lives.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-03-08/news/os-orange-county-pit-bull-breed-identity-20140308_1_animal-shelter-orange-shelter-breed
Which raises an interesting question. If animal workers may lie about animals to save them, why shouldn’t ordinary citizens do the same thing on a dog license application? Who gets to decide what breeds are and what they mean? Are we headed for the canine equivalent of race courts?
Maybe pit bulls need a new name, rebranding I think its called. When I was a kid, grocery stores in Baltimore sold rapeseed oil, but nobody bought it because they didn’t like the sound of the name. When the industry renamed it canola oil, everybody bought it. Maybe pit bulls need a new name, like maybe Fluffem-up Terriers.
> My dog is my responsibility. Other people’s dogs are their responsibility. Guilt is not transferable by genes, and there is no collective responsibility.
Yup. Agree. GUILT is not transferable by genes, but behavior is, and any apologist who claims that dogs are blank slates and that “it’s all in how you raise them” is denying genetics, denying facts.
But let’s get to a larger point. You’re right to want to protect YOUR dog, and it’s not wrong for YOUR interests to want pit bull laws to not exist because they’d be inconvenient for you. Fine.
But that doesn’t mean that the big boogey man here is some pit bull hater who wants to kill your dog. The facts are simple:
MORE PIT BULLS ARE KILLED BY PIT BULL LOVERS THAN ANY OTHER SOURCE BY ABOUT 1,000,000 PER YEAR.
Why do I claim this? Because all those pounds who are killing pit bulls are not killing owned loved pit bulls who were stolen from their beds by the dog gestapo. The million pit bulls killed per year are killed because pit bull lovers bred them and pit bull lovers ditched them in shelters.
That’s the math on this. You can worry all you want about big brother coming for your pit. And if you haven’t ditched your dog in a shelter, that’s probably a rational thing to do. But that’s not the weight of the problem.
The weight of the problem is by people who WANT these dogs making too many of them, giving too many of them away, and then ditching too many of them.
That’s the math on this. BSL and Pit Bull Bans are not driving these numbers at all. Less than 4% of the population in the country lives under any sort of BSL.
Breeding for certain traits is far from an exact science. The trait that dog fighters might call “gameness” in a pit bull exists in a minority, and (as many a dog fighter has learned) there are countless pit bulls who will not fight at all — even if forced. Similarly, there are many pointers that will not point, many retrievers that will not retrieve, coon hounds that will not track raccoons, etc. I suppose my dog Coco might have been a decent fighting dog had I raised and encouraged her to fight, but I did not. She gets along well with other dogs. Still, I do not maintain that my dog’s behavior is predictive of other dogs’ behavior, nor do I appreciate hearing people say that because another pit bull mauled a child, Coco will too.
But people argue that drugs created the murderous cartels, alcohol causes violence, property causes theft, and guns cause suicide.
Who claimed breeding for traits was an exact science? That’s hardly the point.
The truth is that pit bulls were and are still bred for behaviors and physical abilities that contribute to being aggressive and violent.
Unlike the gun debate, guns do not have volition. Guns are not alive. They do not aim at people and fire themselves.
But dogs do, with or without human guidance.
It’s also a rather boring and unimportant observation that there are “pointers that will not point.” Well, there are pointers who are not OPTIMAL pointers, but there are none that have not been bred to point, who have not been given selection over many generations to maximize their ability and inbred desire to point.
Sure, there might be pointers who do not have all the components come together to create a pointer that is optimal for a breeder who wants to win trophies on it, but there are very very very few who fail to have any instinct, who fail to have any behaviors and fail to have any ability.
Sort of like how there are very few Dalmatians that don’t have spots. The POINT was to maximize that trait and breeders did.
Same with pit bulls.
So sure, there are pit bulls who suck at being pit bulls. There are pit bulls who won’t have everything in place to become the one dog some fighter wants to use in their fights. That doesn’t in any way prevent those failures from being dangerous to other dogs.
If we had someone get a Border Collie and then have them cry and moan because their dog herded their children around or nipped their heels, we’d call those owners stupid for expecting a dog that was bred to herd, a trait we know is genetic, from being magically able to not express that trait when it’s not desired.
Not every BC is going to win a sheep trial, but that means nothing if we ask how many BCs will show profound inbred traits. Almost all will.
There are any number of breeds where stupid people pick them because they like the look without thinking at all that the breed also comes with traits that are obnoxious or dangerous.
How many idiots own beagles and are then frustrated because their dog doesn’t shut up and sounds like it’s being killed every time it goes out in the yard and sees a squirrel or another dog?
How many toy breed owners just can’t seem to housebreak their purse pouches? Many, because they don’t advertise “these breeds suck at house breaking” along with “they look very cute in your bag.”
Predicative breed behavior is what all of dog breeding is about. Only apologists suddenly think that the exception is the majority and that their cute pets are not, in fact, the product of breeding for things that we now find unpalatable.
Aggressive and violent? Sorry, but if someone breaks into my house, I WANT my dog to be aggressive and violent. It could save my life. Many dogs are more aggressive and violent than pit bulls, though. If I wanted a dog only for home self defense, I would want a Doberman, German Shepherd, Rhodesian Ridgeback, or Rottweiler, not a pit bull. Again, these are generalizations, and not a guarantee of anything. People can make up their own minds about dogs any way they want. My objection is to people trying to tell me what kind of dog I can have. Unless I fail to control my dog, it is not their business.
> My objection is to people trying to tell me what kind of dog I can have. Unless I fail to control my dog, it is not their business.
Well you’ll get no argument from me on this. I don’t believe in prior restraint and nanny state toy management.
But that doesn’t change facts about pit bulls or any other breed. And whereas most breeders and fancy will tell you how their dog which hasn’t seen a sheep in 5 generations is still “a herding dog” … and they’re right, those genes don’t magically disappear any less than their coat color stays in the gene pool, etc.
Pit Bulls were bred and selected for aggression. Specifically dog aggression. But that doesn’t stop them from being the most popular cause of severe human bites and death.
Well more than even their popularity accounts for. And this just makes basic sense. Dogs are not blank slates. They come with baggage and when you get popular, you don’t lose that, and idiot and ignorant owners don’t know that their dogs come with traits that need to be trained and managed and overcome.
Dogs are not Chia Pets, you buy one and you neglect it and it doesn’t really matter.
And the biggest cause of Pit Bull death is not BSL or anything of the sort. BSL hasn’t killed in total the number of pit bulls that are killed EVERY DAY simply by being thrown away by owners who WANTED them and then got rid of them.
So really, you have every right to be all wee wee’d up about someone telling you you can’t own one. But unless you’re part of the 4% who actually live under BSL, it’s more symbolic.
And that doesn’t give you or anyone the right to deny that Pit Bulls come with breed behaviors that can make them bad dog neighbors and bad near people.
It’s no guarantee… nothing is. And it doesn’t mean that every person is going to fail their pit or their house guests or someone else’s dog. But if you look at the numbers, there are simply way too many pit bulls being killed to ignore that as being a huge problem in the breed.
Shelter killing is almost insignificant for all other breeds. It’s not for pit bulls.
So if you want to continue your anti-BSL crusade, by all means, but trying to make unsupported claims that pit bulls are just magic and blank slates and like all other dogs to do so is a lie.
I’m anti BSL. But I’m not willing to lie about pit bulls or any other breed for the sake of getting BSL off the books.
Arguing prior restraint is more honest to me than some platitudes about “it’s all in how you raise them” nonsense.
“MORE PIT BULLS ARE KILLED BY PIT BULL LOVERS THAN ANY OTHER SOURCE BY ABOUT 1,000,000 PER YEAR.”
Yes, huge numbers of pit bulls are killed in dog pounds, but you are wrong about faulting ‘pit bull lovers.’ This isn’t the result of loving pit bulls. It the fault of irresponsible dog owners who didn’t spay or neuter their pets, allowed them to breed, but with no intention of finding homes for the resulting puppies. That isn’t love. That’s just irresponsible.
> Yes, huge numbers of pit bulls are killed in dog pounds, but you are wrong about faulting ‘pit bull lovers.’ This isn’t the result of loving pit bulls. It the fault of irresponsible dog owners who didn’t spay or neuter their pets, allowed them to breed, but with no intention of finding homes for the resulting puppies. That isn’t love. That’s just irresponsible.
But it’s not puppies. The average age pit bulls get turned in to shelters is something like 18 months. Basically the age when people finally give up on controlling their adolescent pit bull and their inbred traits.
Even more, you’re unwise to make the argument you are, as you’re basically saying that pit bull owners are profoundly and uniquely irresponsible and that’s justification for BSL right there.
See, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have pit bulls dominating shelter stats and then claim that it’s a problem that is equal across all dogs.
And there’s no reason that you can’t be BOTH a pit bull lover and irresponsible.
I am a landlord. I allow my tenants to have cats and dogs, but not pit bulls. There are a number of reasons for this. First, my insurance agent has told me several times that if my insurance carrier discovered that there were pit bulls in my building, they would cancel my liability insurance, and I have to have liability insurance.
The curious thing about pit bull owners is that most of them appear to be in a state of extreme denial. For example, on several occasions, pit bull owners have told me: “There is no such thing as a pit bull,” but that’s not true. While there are several breeds that are mistaken for pit bulls, like the American Bulldog, pit bulls do exist. Pit bulls are not mythical creatures like unicorns, but I have met a number of pit bull owners who talk about them that way.