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'via Blog this'"Some people are afraid of any kind of dog—you know that," he admonished. "Dogs know when someone is afraid, and they're apt to be more aggressive." So the mothers are the problem.
Pit bulls have been bred specifically to be aggressive. They're descended from the now- extinct old English "bulldogge," a big, tenacious breed used in the brutal early- nineteenth-century sport of bull baiting, in which rowdy spectators watched dogs tear apart an enraged bull. Victorian reformers, concerned about the coarsening effect bull baiting had on its devotees, banned it by the early 1830s, but enterprising bull baiters merely migrated to an equally bloody sport: organized dog fighting.
All men may be created equal, but not all dogs. Says Katherine Houpt, director of the Animal Behavior Clinic at Cornell and author ofDomestic Animal Behavior: "Different breeds have genetic predispositions to certain kinds of behavior, though that can be influenced by how they are raised. The pit bull is an innately aggressive breed, often owned by someone who wants an aggressive dog, so they're going to encourage it."
Pit bulls have been bred specifically to be aggressive. They're descended from the now- extinct old English "bulldogge," a big, tenacious breed used in the brutal early- nineteenth-century sport of bull baiting, in which rowdy spectators watched dogs tear apart an enraged bull. Victorian reformers, concerned about the coarsening effect bull baiting had on its devotees, banned it by the early 1830s, but enterprising bull baiters merely migrated to an equally bloody sport: organized dog fighting.
As Carl Semencic, author of several informative books on guard dogs, and a big pit-bull fan, describes it, the bulldogge owners made a striking discovery: "a cross between the bulldogge and any of the game [i.e., brave and tenacious] and relatively powerful terriers of the day produced a game, powerful, agile, and smaller, more capable opponent in the dog pits." These bull-and-terrier crosses became renowned for fighting prowess and soon were the only dogs used in organized dog fighting in England and later in the United States. To preserve the bull-and-terrier's pugnacious traits, the dogs were bred only to dogs of the same cross. Thus was born the pit-bull terrier, "the most capable fighting dog known to modern man," Semencic enthuses.
—the pit-bull terrier is first and last a fighting dog. Its breeding history separates it from other tough dogs like Doberman pinschers and rottweilers, which have been bred to guard their masters and their property. Pit bulls are genetically wired to kill other dogs.
quicker to anger than most dogs
unusually high level of the neurotransmitter L-tyrosine
pit bulls are frighteningly tenacious
attacks frequently last for 15 minutes or longer
remarkable insensitivity to pain
attacks without warning
the pit bull may follow an apparently playful bow with a lethal assault
Drug dealers, who use pit bulls, or pit-bull crosses, as particularly vicious sentinels. New York City cops had to shoot 83 dogs to death in 1997, most of them pit bulls guarding drug stashes. Burkhart showed me a few such sentinels in the center's dangerous-dog ward. Lunging against their metal cages, these pit bulls were the most ferocious animals I'd ever seen: pure animal fury. "This one would bite my head off if he had the chance," Burkhart said of one Schwarzenegger-muscled dog, brought in from a police raid on a crack house. Intimidated, I kept as far from the cages as I could. "Some of the pit bulls coming in will actually have their vocal cords removed in order to surprise someone lurking around a crack house," Burkhart noted.
Dog-fighting rings also fill the CACC with abused animals.
It's an unsavory crowd that participates, whether as trainer or spectator, in the blood sport, says ASPCA humane-law-enforcement officer George Watford. "The trainers preparing a pit bull for a fight throw a rope over a branch with a bag tied at the end; inside the bag will be a live cat," Watford explains. "You'll see a dog hanging from the bag, and it'll be a cat he's killing inside it, giving the pit bull the taste for blood." The spectators are just as bad, Watford says: "When we raid a ring, not only will there be shotgun-armed lookouts, but we'll search people and find drugs and weapons, and we'll always find people wanted for rape, murder, robbery charges."
Finally, the CACC gets pit bulls owned by teenagers and gang members—"young punks," Watford calls them—who raise the dogs to intimidate. "It's a macho thing," Watford says. Typically, these teens lose interest in their brutalized—and usually unneutered—dogs and let them loose, swamping the city with stray pit bulls.
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