(Beth Clifton collage)
Pit bull pushing is not a game show
Humans appear to have discovered the rewards of canine companionship to enhance and enrich our daily lives so far back in the Ice Ages that cave bears were a constant threat and a “Three-Dog Night” was not a band but an early form of home heating, perhaps even before the use of fire.
Archaeology suggests human use of fire came as long as two million years ago, while the first unequivocal evidence of dogs as family members goes back only 33,000 years.
That, though, may only be because rocks showing evidence of use in a fire pit endure much longer than most organic matter.
Caveman & cave dog.
(Beth Clifton collage)
For 30,000 years dogs did no documented harm
Whenever dogs were first domesticated, our distant ancestors had discovered that a family dog could serve both as a companion and as a loyal and protective family member about three times as long ago as anyone thought of piling up stones to build evidence of a civilization.
That far back, humans recognized dogs as playful, intelligent, and affectionate, and included dogs in our earliest surviving art and legends.
The first description of a dog harming a human did not enter literature until street dogs finished off the evil Queen Jezebel circa 852 BCE in what is now Lebanon.
Mark Twain on shipboard with his dog Blue, awaiting dinner.
“The principal difference between a dog and man”
For most of human history, both the unrecorded majority of it and the better documented most recent 3,000 years, adopting a homeless dog from the streets or practically anywhere was a safe and viable option.
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man,” advised Mark Twain in the earliest days of modern animal shelters.
Mark Twain’s advice was still generally applicable before 2007. Animal shelters had a hard-earned reputation, developed over about 150 years, for being the safest places to acquire a new family dog, having presumably euthanized any owner-surrendered or impounded dog of known bite history or evident aggressive or unstable temperament.
(Beth Clifton collage)
No-kill did not bring change for the worse––not immediately
Even as shelter dog intake and killing plummeted through the advent of spay/neuter, animal shelters retained a positive image as the best place for anyone to find a dog for more than a decade into the “no-kill” era.
Among the first five Americans killed by adopted shelter dogs, 1988-2006, only one of the dogs came from a no-kill shelter, and only one was a pit bull.
Animal shelter adoption counselors still emphasized to prospective adopters the importance of doing the homework necessary to find the type of dog who would best fit the adoptive family’s lifestyle, and of matching the needs of the dog to the abilities of the adopter.
Animal control agencies, shelters and rescues tended to demonstrate an honest approach to adoption, to achieve the best outcomes for both humans and dogs.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Michael Vick
So what changed?
Everything! The April 2007 Michael Vick dogfighting bust generated huge public sympathy for the 66 dogs impounded from Vick, 53 of them pit bulls.
(See 15 years ago Michael Vick’s pit bulls killed the humane movement.)
The 13 dogs other than pit bulls were promptly sent to animal shelters for adoption. The five pit bulls known to have been fought were euthanized.
The Humane Society of the U.S. recommended that the remaining 48 pit bulls, from fighting lines, should also be euthanized, but the no-kill Best Friends Animal Society and the American SPCA saw the opportunity to pull away donor support from their biggest rival, and fell all over each other to turn saving the Michael Vick pit bulls into a lucrative bandwagon.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Money-making potential
From the beginning the Michael Vick case reeked of money-making potential, involving a high-profile celebrity, already often in the headlines and now sure to stay there.
Donors love dogs, especially underdogs. Some of the Vick pit bulls were still young enough to be cute. Dogfighting approaches the epitome of animal cruelty. Rescuing dogs from dogfighting thereby could be depicted as an unquestionably worthy cause that the virtue-signaling public could throw money at.
The Best Friends Animal Society elevated pit bulls to the status of “America’s Dog!” with a hugely well-financed advertising campaign borrowing techniques from the tobacco industry.
ANIMALS 24-7 was exposing the big lies about pit bulls five years before even Ann Landers.
HSUS flip-flopped
Even the Humane Society of the U.S. flip-flopped faster than a pit bull charging across the scratch line to kill a rival in a dogfight, reinventing itself as a pit bull advocacy organization after decades of advising the advice columnist Ann Landers that pit bulls should never be trusted as family companions.
(See Pit bulls, Ann Landers, & Dr. Laura and Pit bulls, bunnies, & advice from Ann Landers on her 100th birthday.)
In short, the Michael Vick dogfighting case became the impetus and the spark that would ignite the proponents of pit bulls to start an all-out, no-holds-barred, multifaceted campaign to place a pit bull or two or three in every home––which was necessary if the U.S. was to become a “no-kill nation,” because the adopt-don’t-shop message had been so successful that practically no other dogs were to be found in abundance in shelters.
Wayne Pacelle & pit bull.
(HSUS/ Sarah Barnett)
Xtreme makeover
But before all the impounded and owner-surrendered pit bulls could be rehomed, these poor forlorn dogs needed an extreme makeover by what is now termed the pit bull lobby, a well-funded, well-connected constellation of animal charities with––knowingly or not––links to dogfighters among the individuals they suddenly relied on to provide pit bull expertise.
Echoed from dogfighters came the Big Lies, among many others, that pit bulls had once been “nanny dogs,” that dogfighters had “weeded out” mankillers, and that bad owners are solely to blame for pit bull mayhem.
How could average animal-loving Americans see this betrayal of trust occurring, conflating the true nature of the line-bred fighting pit bull and pit bull mixes carrying the fighting traits and genes?
(Beth Clifton collage)
Humane societies were trusted institutions
The ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society, and Humane Society of the U.S., along with the many local humane societies taking cues from them, were at the time among our most trusted institutions.
(They are no longer, chiefly in consequence of nearly 20 years of pit bull advocacy, but humane movement loss of credibility is a topic for another day.)
Emotions favoring the Michael Vick pit bulls ran high through the public who cared deeply for animals, and were exploited to encourage indiscriminate adoptions of any and all pit bulls.
The exploitation included the new Big Lie that the Michael Vick pit bulls had been “saved” by the Best Friends Animal Society, which received 22 of them, and the California organization BADRAP, which took 10. Just a handful were ever successfully and verifiably rehomed.
Tori Whitehurst, 4.
Tori Whitehurst
The Big Lie could have been countered with the story of Tori Whitehurst.
In April 2007, right at about the same time as the Michael Vick bust, someone whose name has never been disclosed adopted a neutered male pit bull named Kane, called an American bulldog, from the Arizona Humane Society.
Kane the pit bull was subsequently passed along to Ian and Carin Whitehurst, both age 36 at the time. The Arizona Humane Society denied knowledge of the pass-along.
On November 5, 2007, Kane killed four-year-old Tori Whitehurst. Her nanny fought desperately to save her, stabbing Kane with scissors and trying to push him away with a pool cue.
Joe Arpaio & Mickey, the pit bull who without provocation mauled four-year-old Kevin Vicente in February 2014, whom Arpaio subsequently adopted.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Then-Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, an outspoken pit bull advocate who spoke at national conferences for both the Best Friends Animal Society and the Humane Society of the U.S., told media that his deputies had to shoot Kane seven times before they could retrieve Tori Whitehurst’s remains.
The Tori Whitehurst case, however, went almost unreported except by the Arizona Republic and ANIMALS 24-7.
Pit bulls & COVID-19
Psychological warfare was waged to fool the public, with the public unaware. No one in authority in the animal sheltering field seemed to care what the consequences would be.
The big lie spread through the country much as COVID-19 did later, along with comparable myths about safety precautions.
(In either case, the best advice was to avoid being with the source of risk in a confined place. Masking, however, was billed as a “trigger” for pit bull attacks, and a conspicuous overlap developed among pit bull advocates and anti-vaxxers. See Anti-Vaxxers and the pit bull advocacy movement.)
(Beth Clifton collage)
Opposite of the intended effect
Pit bull advocacy by humane organizations not only inflicted an often fatal injustice on people, but proved to have the opposite of the intended effect for pit bulls.
Even as personal and public safety dropped to the bottom of awareness among the agencies entrusted with the responsibility of protecting the public and our companion animals, popularizing pit bulls to promote shelter adoptions also stimulated pit bull breeding.
When the Michael Vick bust occurred, pit bulls were already close to 25% of shelter dog intake, two-thirds of shelter dog euthanasias, and at the same time, about a third of shelter dog inventory.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Pit bull intake & inventory doubled
Shelter intake of pit bulls and pit bull inventory have both approximately doubled since then, even though pit bulls continue to be about two-thirds of shelter dog euthanasias.
At peak, about a third of the total U.S. pit bull population passed through animal shelters each and every year. This number may have dropped only because the rise of “managed admissions” has enabled shelters to maintain “no-kill” status by refusing to take in pit bulls, which in turn has triggered a visible surge in pit bulls being dumped to run at large.
This is especially evident in rural areas near big cities, such as the Redlands just outside the Miami-Dade metropolitan area, the Texas hill country between San Antonio and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and on Native American reservations within easy driving distance of any big city.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Mark Twain again
Mark Twain, as well as encouraging dog adoptions, also wrote that, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Mark Twain was right, but lies in the advent of social media travel much farther and faster.
The number of fatal and disfiguring pit bull attacks rises annually to new all-time highs, as ANIMALS 24-7 has documented since 1982.
The damage done by ill-intentioned, ignorant, and even well-intentioned pit bull advocates is irreparable.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Shout from the rooftops
Though we cannot undo the loss of life, the pain, the broken families, and the diminished lives of those who have suffered pit bull attacks, for those who do understand the truth we have the obligation and responsibility to shout from the rooftops to try to prevent the next maiming or death of another human being or innocent animal.
You may have heard ad nauseum that pit bulls are like any other dog and that they make wonderful companion animals, so adopt a shelter pit bull.
If pit bulls were indeed like any other dog, they and their innumerable variants masquerading under other breed names would not be “fighting dogs” in the first place.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Fighting to the death is not normal dog behavior
Fighting to the death is simply not normal or natural dog behavior. Neither is attacking family members. If it had been, dogs never would have been admitted to the circles at the campfires of our proto-human ancestors.
If you visit an animal shelter to adopt a dog, you will likely hear a fictional history of the dog, or be told that the dog has no history, certainly not any bite history, and you will usually be told that a dog is not a pit bull, no matter how many visible pit bull traits the dog exhibits.
You will be told that a pit bull offered for adoption is dog-selective or cat-selective and shows no signs of aggression.
In other words, the dog will only attack certain other dogs and cats, who may have in common only that the dog sees them. Infants and small children will be in the same “prey range.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Aggression is aggression
In truth, aggression is aggression, whether directed toward other animals, people, or food and toys.
Buyer beware. Those who adopt out pit bulls are behaviorally little different from used car salesmen, though it must be noted that unsafe cars do not drive themselves into accidents.
Instead of making money on the used car, the goal of the pit bull rescue is to “save” the pit bull by getting the pit bull out the front door and into your home.
If the pit bull is euthanized, dumped, or shot by police while mauling someone after that, no matter; the pit bull was “rescued” nonetheless, and blame for the outcome can be placed on a “bad owner,” of a sort seldom seen adopting any other sort of dog.
See Who eats the most Floridians––pythons, pit bulls, bears, or alligators? (Beth Clifton collage)
Trying to train out genetics
The most important point to understand about pit bull deception is what an adopter will have brought into his or her home, whether a pit bull puppy or a grown adult.
If you are a pit bull adopter, your eventual utter disappointment will cost you up to twelve years of intensive behavior management in order to prevent bad behavior and aggression toward people and animals, even though training the genetics out of a pit bull works about as well as converting a crocodile to an oatmeal diet.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Socializing” will not be an option
“Socializing” will not be an option, in direct conflict with what the pit bull lobby tells you. Initially your pit bull may seemingly co-exist with your other dogs or cats, but one day you will come home to a bloody massacre.
At some point, if you are truly a caring, empathic person, you will realize that visiting public parks to socialize your pit bull is not an option.
About one fatal dog attack on another dog in ten occurs in a dog park, ANIMALS 24-7 learned from examining 2023 data.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Isolation & stress
Visits by family and friends to your home will diminish to none at all.
Package deliveries and visits from repairmen will become a frequent source of stress.
Your neighbors will not approve of your choice of dog.
If your children or grandchildren play at each other’s houses, this is likely to end, leading to still more isolation and stress.
Walks with your pit bull, unless you are blithely unaware of the risks, will become unenjoyable.
(See Why pit bulls will break your heart.)
(Beth Clifton collage)
Unfulfilled & confining
You will notice other pedestrians and dog-walkers you approach moving their hands to concealed firearms, while trying to stay well clear of the maximum extent of your leash.
Life as you knew it will become unfulfilled and confining. Your pit bull will become the center of your life, leaving your life unbalanced. Soon you will be suffering from depression and loneliness for human interaction. You may seek company among other pit bull owners, but that will last only until, inevitably, your dogs fight.
You may become angry and bitter at yourself and at other people, including family members, who are only trying to keep themselves safe from harm.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Don’t tell anyone to choose a pit bull
Think this can’t happen to you? Think the pit bull you choose will be a good one?
Think that you once knew a pit bull who was sweet and silly and that there are good ones?
Think with love and kindness you will raise a good dog?
Then you would be wrong and have bought into the Big Lie, a well-funded lie that has taken America by storm, piling up fatalities and disfigurements of animals and humans that take ANIMALS 24-7 up to an hour a day just to log in data charts.
Beth & Merritt Clifton.
Your family, friends, neighbors and community are counting on you to choose your canine companions wisely with your and their safety in mind.
If you are a shelter worker or animal rescuer, as most ANIMALS 24-7 readers are, or have been, bear in mind your responsibility to adopters and the public.
Don’t tell anyone to choose a pit bull.
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The post Pit bulls: Truth or Consequences? by Beth Clifton appeared first on Animals 24-7.
