From: rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin)
Newsgroups: rec.pets.dogs
Subject: Re: pitbulls
Date: 7 Oct 92 12:46:18 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ



Sharon Hope writes:
[about negatives of pit bull]

Most of the ``information'' out there about pit bulls is wrong -
be very careful to distinguish what was written before the pit bull
crisis from what was written after TPBC.

As Sharon notes, it takes several generations for the genes to change,
so apply that to the abrupt change in pit bull perceptions.

Sharon is right, that anyhow if you live in the wrong area, having
a pit bull is like talking to the district attorney, because that
is what you'll spend all your time having to do, not because your
dog is anything bad and hasn't stolen your heart, as pit bulls usually
do steal your heart, but because you're talking to people who Know Everything.

Here's a test Vicki Hearne wrote up in a cranky mood.  The object
is to see how quickly you can believe it.

  Over a three-year period, 20 out of 28 people killed by dogs in
  the United States were victims of pit bull attacks.
  
  Pit bulls are especially dangerous because of their double jaws,
  which are developed by inbreeding so that they can hold on with
  the front jaw while they chew away behind.  These dogs are
  genetically vicious and their training is part of their genetics.
  
  Also, families may honestly believe that their dog is a gentle
  pet, never realizing that they might be harboring a dog who suffers
  from the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome and might turn on the children at any
  moment.  Funding for expert evaluation and investigation of this
  crisis is required immediately.
  
  The threat represented by these dogs, one of the many tragic results
  of the increasing drug trade in America, is insidious and urgent.
  
Here's the test:
  
  1. How many persons died of dog attacks in the study period?
  
  2. How many of these deaths were caused by pit bulls?
  
  3. Why is the apparent docility of a family pet misleading?
  
  4. What causes the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome?
  
  5. What is unusual about a pit bull's jaws?
  
She comments that doing well on such tests is a matter not of
comprehending quickly enough, but of BELIEVING quickly enough,
and that is why such tests are culturally biased, because blacks
and Hispanics know better, they are cynical.

---
more on the crisis:

  In the fall of 1987 there was a week-long ABC special on pit bulls.
  You had your intrepid reporter going into one of Those Neighborhoods,
  dedicated to truth but all a-tremble because: ``There might be
  pit bulls anywhere!''  The intrepid reporter is eventually seen
  interviewing a nin-year-old boy, along these lines:
  
  Q: Is that your dog?
  
  A: (proudly, fondling the ear of a more or less bull-type dog who
  looks as ferocious as Bill Cosby, though not nearly so energetic) Yes!
  His name is Spike, and he's my dog.  He's a good dog! [We hear a fair
  amount about how Spike is always there, and never deserts his friends,
  and doesn't wet in the house, and never refuses to play.]
  
  Q: Do you fight your dog?
  
  A: Yes, I fight with my friend.  We fight every day after school.
  Sometimes my friend wins and I pay him money, and sometimes I win
  and he pays me money.
  
  Q: Do you like your dog?
  
  A: I _love_ him!  He does everything with me.  Other people -
  my mom gets mad with me, but he don't.
  
  At this stage, an ASPCA or generically Kind truck appears, and
  gentlemen with snare poles leap out and ``capture'' Spike, who
  responds with good humor and is dragged off to the paddy
  wagon by men who are having a hard time making the capture
  look dangerous enough to justify rolling the minicams.
  
  The child - of course the child runs after the men, crying, crying,
  crying, Crying out ``Please! Help! Stop!  They're going to kill
  my dog!''
  
  
  The voice-over asks the audience, ``What are we going to do about
  this horror?''  The horror I was was a child terrified and brutalized
  because the state - in the form, as I recall, of the ASPCA, which has
  a contract to handle animal control in New York - was impounding his
  best friend, but the horror the newscaster had in mind was the child
  himself, not the child's terror and grief.  The child was the emblem
  and instance of the overwhelming specter of dogfighting and the dope
  trade.

---

later:
  The child - of course, long before my fantasy IQ test, there is
  the episode in which the child runs after the men, crying.  Crying
  out to ABC: ``Please! Help! They're going to kill my dog!''
  And how foolishly, too, for it is to representatives of the media,
  in this and other episodes, that people who are afraid of losing their
  dogs have cried out, ``Help! Help!'' The media, by and large, have not
  answered this cry, and poetry cannot answer the cry, being promised
  to a different territory of the ideal - to truth rather than justice.
  The poet's response might be, if the muse approved the project,
  to sing a song of Spike, celebrating perhaps even the small boy's
  pride in Spike's vaunted fighting prowess, and that would not help
  at all, not even if you explained to the Assistant Attorney General
  that the dog wasn't really a fighter and it was the young boy's
  yearning for a dream of prowess that was being celebrated, which
  is to say the song's yearning for prowess and nothing to do with
  small boys anyhow, and justice would note be served thereby.

---
or later somewhere, I can't find the quote, that fighting ability
used to be an emblem of friendship, that good friends were good
fighters, would fight for you.

Or that courage and gentleness may be aspects of the same faculty,
they come or go together.

And to the point: it is very easy to turn that into a horror story,
a story about how gentleness turns into terror, which is a wish
to deny something very important.