blainethemono
Member
From the August 2014 issue of Esquire magazine. The full article is longer and does a great job encompassing a lot of different facets of this topic, so I would suggest reading the whole thing if you have any interest. I think it's one of the best pieces i've read on the subject so far.
This is a story about an American dog: my dog, Dexter. And because Dexter is a pit bull, this is also a story about the American dog, because pit bulls have changed the way Americans think about dogs in general. Reviled, pit bulls have become representative. There is no other dog that figures as often in the national narrative—no other dog as vilified on the evening news, no other dog as defended on television programs, no other dog as mythologized by both its enemies and its advocates, no other dog as discriminated against, no other dog as wantonly bred, no other dog as frequently abused, no other dog as promiscuously abandoned, no other dog as likely to end up in an animal shelter, no other dog as likely to be rescued, no other dog as likely to be killed. In a way, the pit bull has become the only American dog, because it is the only American dog that has become an American metaphor—and the only American dog that people bother to name. When a cocker spaniel bites, it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.
There are two ironies here: The first is, as pit-bull advocates like to point out, "the pit bull is not a breed; it's a classification." Even the municipalities that have banned it acknowledge as much in the language of their laws, which is a language of approximation. Denver, for instance, stipulates that a pit bull "is defined as any dog that is an American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, or any dog displaying the majority of physical traits of any one (1) or more of the above breeds, or any dog exhibiting those distinguishing characteristics which substantially conform to the standards established by the American Kennel Club or United Kennel Club for any of the above breeds." Yet Luis Salgado, the animal-services investigator charged with enforcing the pit-bull ban in Miami, admits that "there is no reliable DNA testing for that breed. DNA is useless. If you look at where that breed came from, there's American bulldog, there's terrier—all watered down and mixed together to produce the dog we now call the pit bull." What Salgado uses to establish a dog's genetic identity is not genetics but rather "physical characteristics—we have a forty-seven-point checklist. Any dog that substantially conforms to the characteristics of a pit bull is considered a pit bull."
You know one when you see one, in other words—and so the second irony proceeds from the first: You see a lot of them. The pit bull is not a breed but a conglomeration of traits, and those traits are reshaping what we think of as the American dog, which is to say the American mutt. A few generations ago, the typical mutt was a rangy dog with a long snout and pricked ears—a shepherd mix. Now it looks like a pit bull. This is not simply because so many pit-bull owners oppose spaying and neutering their dogs and their dogs are bred so frequently and haphazardly; nor is it simply because so many of the traits associated with pit bulls have proven common. It's because the very definition of a pit bull is so elastic and encompassing. As Salgado says, "It doesn't have to be purebred to be considered a pit bull." A German shepherd crossed with a pit bull is a pit bull. A cocker spaniel crossed with a pit bull is a pit bull. "We had a beautiful dog in here not long ago that was a pit-Weimaraner mix," says Lieutenant Cheryl Shepard, who runs the animal shelter in Cobb County, Georgia, where I live. "But we try not to call dogs pit mixes, because then nobody will adopt them. So we called it a Weimaraner mix. And it looked like a Weimaraner. It had a lot of the traits of a Weimaraner. We found a woman to adopt it. But she took it to her vet and he said, 'No, that's a pit bull.' She returned it the next day."
Thirty years after it first attained notoriety as an accessory to the inner-city drug trade, the pit bull has become commonplace in the United States. No one knows exactly how many there are, especially if pit-bull mixes are included in the estimate, for despite going unregistered and uncounted, the pit bull has achieved near omnipresence in big cities and even a certain hard-won popularity in the suburbs. But at the same time, it has become less a type of dog than a strain of dog that still makes many Americans deeply uncomfortable. The demographic shifts that are transforming America's human population find a mirror in the demographic shifts that are transforming America's canine one, with the same effect: More and more we become what we somehow can't abide. We might accept pit bulls personally, but America still doesn't accept them institutionally, where it counts; indeed, apartment complexes and insurance companies are arrayed in force against them. And so are we: For although we adopt them by the thousands, we abandon them by the millions. The ever-expanding population of dogs considered pit bulls feeds an ever-expanding population of dogs condemned as pit bulls, and we resolve this rising demographic pressure in the way to which we've become accustomed: in secret, and in staggering numbers. We have always counted on our dogs to tell us who we are. But what pit bulls tell us is that who we think we are is increasingly at odds with what we've turned out to be.
Now, any dog that comes as a rescue comes with its own apocrypha. Nobody knows his past, so a past is ascribed to him. But when we met Carson, his past as a "bait dog"—a nonfighting dog whom fighting dogs gnaw on as a prelude to combat—was inscribed on his body. He had broken teeth. He had filigrees of scarring around his eyes. He had broad hairless patches of scarring around his neck that revealed his pale porcine skin. He had a ten-inch burn down his back that people often mistook for raised hackles. And yet he managed to strike a comic figure instead of a tragic one—that was his glimmer. He had one ear up and one ear down, protuberant green eyes, a panting grin that wrinkled his cheeks, and an air of insistence and optimism that was never anything less than ridiculous given his circumstances. He climbed onto my wife's lap on a day that happened to be my wife's birthday, and we thought he was giving himself to her as a special gift; we didn't know until later that climbing onto the laps of perfect strangers was his move: his survival mechanism and perhaps his con. Whatever it was, it worked. We took him home that day and promptly freaked out.
Well, my wife did. Her friends did. We were in the process of adopting our daughter, and they told her that she was putting everything at risk. You got what? A pit bull? A fighting dog? Have you lost your mind? We contemplated giving Carson back until we took him for a walk one day and a school bus emptied out in front of us. We tried to stop the children from accosting him—"We don't know him!"—but they were all over him, and there he stood in the middle of them, with his grin and his glimmer. We wound up taking him to a canine behaviorist at the University of Georgia, who spent four hours with him and said, "He's a great dog" while assuring us that he was a dog before he was a pit bull.
And that is the heart of the matter when you own a pit bull. The language of institutional animosity toward your dog—the language of breed bans and insurance restrictions—takes great pains to declare that your dog is not like other dogs but rather something less and at the same time something more: something Other. And I have to admit there was something different about Carson. For reasons that must be hardwired to our own species, dog owners everywhere ask the same question of their dogs: "Are you a good boy?" But when you have a dog as brutalized as Carson had been, a dog as indelibly marked by blood ritual, the question acquires an existential urgency. You really want to know, and what distinguished Carson from any other dog I've owned was how he answered. We had him for eleven years, and in that time he demonstrated that the goodness of certain creatures has to be innate, since his was definitely not instilled by humans. If he triumphed over his own supposed nature, he also triumphed over ours, and as such he had the sheen of miracle about him—there was just no accounting for him, even when he died. He was old and he was arthritic, and we thought he had kidney disease when in fact he had a tumor comprised of blood vessels seated deep in his abdomen. It ruptured one night last September, and as he was bleeding out internally at 2:30 in the morning, he managed to jump into our bed to spend his last hours with us. I still don't know how he did it.
When we had Carson, we tried to change our homeowner's policy. My wife called up an underwriter for a quote, and he began to assess what kind of risk we presented. Eventually, he asked if we had a dog. "Yes," my wife said. What kind? "A mixed-breed terrier," my wife said. He asked how much he weighed. "Fifty-five pounds," she said. He then proceeded to ask about his coat, his coloring, the width of his head, and the shape of his tail—he then proceeded, in other words, to profile him, using the same kind of checklist that Investigator Salgado uses in Miami.
I was outraged—not because they were profiling us but rather because they were profiling Carson. He had never hurt anybody or anything; he was who he was because he wouldn't fight. Several times he had been attacked while I walked him—by a chocolate Lab, by a big old hound dog, and by a pack of dogs led by an overwhelmed walker. He was a good dog, and we were responsible dog owners who obeyed leash laws. Why were we paying the price for pit-bull owners—dog owners—who didn't?
I am aware that my argument has been made before: for Second Amendment rights and gun ownership. There is a reason for this besides the frequent comparison of pit bulls to AK-47's and the like. More and more, the arguments we have in our society boil down to the same argument, with members of an aggrieved group asking to be considered as individuals and members of society at large insisting on judging them as a group—with the exception deemed the rule. When pit bulls are criminalized, will only criminals have pit bulls? Not exactly. But in 2013, Farmers Insurance decided to limit liability coverage for American Staffordshire terriers, rottweilers, and wolf mixes in the state of California. The company said that those three breeds figured in more than 25 percent of its dog-bite claims and "caused more harm when they attack than any other breed." That left about 75 percent of dog-bite claims unaccounted for by breed—but then, even if dalmatians top bite statistics, most insurance companies don't decline to cover dalmatians.
In 2013, Cobb County took in ten thousand animals, domestic and wild. Five thousand of them were dogs. By conservative estimates, between a quarter and a third of the dogs were pit bulls or pit-bull mixes. But pits and pit mixes accounted for at least three quarters of the shelter population, and a preponderance of the dogs who were unrescued, unadopted, and unclaimed. Last year, the Cobb shelter took in 1,351 dogs identified as pit bulls. It had to euthanize 876 of them—more than 2 a day, 15 a week, 70 a month, in a place run by an animal-control officer sympathetic to their cause.
The numbers can be extrapolated to the rest of the country, and they are unconscionable. America is two countries now—the country of its narrative and the country of its numbers, with the latter sitting in judgment of the former. In the stories we tell ourselves, we are nearly always too good: too soft on criminals, too easy on terrorists, too lenient with immigrants, too kind to animals. In the stories told by our numbers, we imprison, we drone, we deport, and we euthanize with an easy conscience and an avenging zeal. We have become schizophrenic in that way, and pit bulls hold up the same mirror as the 2.2 million souls in our prisons and jails and the more than 350,000 people we deport every year. Every year, American shelters have to kill about 1.2 million dogs. But both pro- and anti-pit-bull organizations estimate that of these, anywhere from 800,000 to nearly 1 million are pit bulls. We kill anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 pit bulls a day. They are rising simultaneously in popularity and disposability, becoming something truly American, a popular dog forever poised on the brink of extermination. There is endless argument over the reliability of bite statistics and breed identification and over the question of whether aggression in dogs is associated with specific genes or environmental triggers common to all dogs: that is, whether pit bulls who bite do so because they are pit bulls or because they are more likely to be intact male dogs at the end of a chain. But even if you concede the worst of the statistics—even if you concede the authority of a fourteen-year-old CDC report that implicated pit bulls and rottweilers in a majority of fatal dog attacks—one thing is certain about pit bulls in America: They are more sinned against than sinning.
In the space of four months, our dog had put two dogs in the hospital. There was human error both times: The cocker spaniel's owner made the mistake of letting him get outside; my wife made the mistake of letting Dexter meet another dog without keeping him under her control. Indeed, when I talked to trainers and behaviorists, they told me that when Dexter went up those stairs, he went into a situation in which some kind of fight was almost inevitable … that he probably thought he was protecting my daughter … that any time a sixty-pound dog goes after a fifteen-pound dog, the fifteen-pound dog is going to get hurt … that anybody who tries to break up a dogfight is going to get bit … and that there is not necessarily a correlation between aggression toward dogs and aggression toward humans. But human error wasn't what concerned me. What concerned me was the loss of our margin of error with Dexter. What concerned me was the question of whether Dexter did what he did as a dog or as a pit bull.
And so I called a professor of comparative genomics from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Western University of Health Sciences named Kris Irizarry. "You look at a pit bull's DNA," he said, "and the only thing you can really tell is that it's a dog. That's why the tests don't work. There's no boundary between what genes may or may not be in the breed, and that's why it's not a breed. It's just a general dog and there's no way to predict its behavior from its appearance. I'm not saying it's not biology that caused your dog to attack another dog. It's biology. But it's dog biology rather than pit-bull biology. And so I'm respectfully asking you: However your dog acts, keep it to your dog. Don't extrapolate and think that all pit bulls do this. Or that all dogs from shelters do this. Or that all short-haired dogs do this. Look at your dog as an individual. That's the challenge."
And then I called Jason Flatt, who lives in Dallas, Georgia, and runs a rescue organization called Friends to the Forlorn. He has a hundred pit bulls on his property. He has pit bulls that have attacked other dogs, pit bulls that have killed other dogs in fighting rings, pit bulls that have bitten people, pit bulls that have bitten him. He has last-chance dogs, dogs deemed dangerous, and a large paw print tattooed on his face as a sign that he will never give up on them, no matter what. And when I told him about Dexter, he said, "Just because a dog doesn't like other dogs doesn't make him a bad dog. But that's the downside to these dogs. A lot of advocates for the breed get mad at me for saying that. But not everybody should have a dog, and not everybody should have a pit bull. I get a lot of dogs out of shelters, and each time I do I expect four things: that he's going to have an upper respiratory infection; that he's going to be heartworm positive; that he's going to have worms; and that he's going to be dog aggressive. If he's not, great. But if he is, well, that's not the point. The point is that we've decided these dogs are expendable. The point is that so many of them are owned by assholes. The point is that people buy and sell them for bags of weed. There are so many out there—I get fifteen hundred e-mails a day from people asking me to take their dogs. And if I took a thousand today, there would be another thousand tomorrow. And they don't deserve that. So you have to take total responsibility for your dog. You have to make sure you don't set him up to fail. You have to save his life, man. Because he'll save yours."
