Talk:American Pit Bull Terrier
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[edit] Additions & Editing, Generally
Just a comment from a pitty-lover.. I volunteer at an animal shelter, and would recommend that the destroying of fighting dogs by animal control is not due to their lack of appeal. Rather, they are destroyed because horrible humans have turned them into killing machines, and there is no reliable way of retrianing them. Therefore, they are a threat to those around them (both human and canine). Our shelter adopts out dozens of lovely pits and pit mixes, and I, for one, look forward to hugging them every week! Thanks for all your hard work! [FlowerGirl, 1/14/2005]
For the commenter above. Just because the dogs have been fought with other dogs doens't make them "killing machines"! Dog aggression does not equal people aggression! [pitlover, 1/26/2006]
- Comment Very true. There are a number of breeds that have a reputation for not being good with other dogs (Chows and Sharpeis come to mind). Some people get lucky; our apbt mix loves other dogs and is good with our cat. OhNoitsJamieTalk 22:20, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
i'm planning on putting in a section about the negative stereotypes and myths surrounding pit bulls, as well as the current trend in the media of focusing only on the bad things that a few pit bull do, etc. if anyone else wants to start it, of course, be my guest. also, i only partially wiki'd the article, and it probably needs a little proofreading. i finally got the basis written, and really needed to get it up asap. Lachatdelarue 01:43, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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- Yes, I know the 'need to get it up--now!' feeling. Good work, Lach. Spotted a couple of minute things; fixed 'em. I think the article would benefit from a discussion of the myths, as you say, and also a reference to pit bulls in popular culture, the heretofore positive image of the 'nanny dog' etc.
- At the end, you use the word 'Amstaff'. If, as I suspect, this refers to American Staffordshire Terrier, you should clarify by putting it in brackets near the beginning under Appearance.
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- I also suggest that under 'why the confusion' we reference the fact that owners are being advised to refer to their breeds as Amstaffs etc. to distance themselves from anti-pitty bias. There have been some nasty fights about the practice.
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- Quill 23:11, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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- Okay, I made some edits. If you disagree, go ahead and change Quill 23:44, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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- Hey im writing a paper on Animal Rights and im focusing mainly on Pit Bull Terriers. Ive realized that Pit Bulls have stated acting wierdly and i happen to have proof that just happens to be on this web site that states that Pit Bulls are sweet tempered dogs... i have reason to beleive that it is the owners have something to do with the wierd behavior can someone please help me figue what is going out. Because if it is abusvie people than i would like to help and alert my school about this discrimination!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Thanx!!!
- Shelby was here!!!!!!!!!!!!
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- Why is the Pit Bull treated this way? Is it because the public cant see what these people are doing to them and see them as a hazard to the public.
- As this is a complete outrage I beleive that the student of AMS should ban togeather and protect these dogs!
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- Please enter a username/or other id if no wiki-user on the talk page (4*~). Note that since the beginning one of the breed charecteristics of the pit bull is that it may/will not attack humans. However it is possible for people to specificly teach it to do so, as is possilbe with any dog breed.ShotokanTuning 09:42, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
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- The reason why pits are treated so badly by criminals has to do with money, or lack thereof. Most people who do this sort of thing are dead poor and live in run down crime ridden areas. For a seventeen year old kid with nothing and nowhere to go, a guy who has money to burn selling drugs looks like a really good deal, and a dogman even better: he can get money from fighting his dogs and deals from the dope dealer. (A lot of dog fighting rings and drug rings are related crimes, for example, in such cases in L.A. and NY they are partially handled by the Narcotics dept.) The welfare of the dog is an afterthought: in a ring a dogman will select from the litter and will treat it badly to make it near crazed. (Google pitbulls +abuse and you will see up close and personal.) To the dogman the dog is a commodity, nothing more. If it loses a fight or gets sick it gets thrown away. If it refuses to fight it gets thrown away or worse. Even way back when dogfighting was a legitimate practice pitbulls didn't have to fight or die: they were usually retired. Today the dog, desparate for a crumb of kindness, will fight, fight, fight for its master, only to be rewarded by dying somewhere alone in a lot.
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- Pits also get sensationalized by the media for these reasons: they are consistent with the average size of a household dog in the U.S. They are associated with crime and "thug life". They were bred since time immemorial to bite down and not let go and some are being bred for all out nastiness, resulting in some nasty incidents. In short, they scare people. It makes the media more money to keep reporting killer dogs than to report the truth that if the public wants the incidents to stop they have to go back to the seventeen year old kid and fix his situation first.
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- Otherwise, the likelihood of a pitbull biting you is about average, in fact it is less than some toy breeds. In good, responsible hands they can be wonderful. I live in downtown Manhattan and I have witnessed these dogs firsthand; a lot of people around here adopt them as the family pooch. I have seen them happily playing ball on a Saturday with a bunch of kids in the park, out with their masters shopping at the farmer's market at Union Square, and allowing strangers to pet them and say hello. (The worst "attack" I ever saw involving a pit bull actually was one where the dog was lunging on his leash, trying to get at a box of donuts and whining, "me too!".) Obviously you don't see too many at dog parks, but if you do see one there is no real reason to run for your life. Shadowcat60 06:42, November 15th, 2005 (EST)
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[edit] Pit Bulls truly have an exaggerated and undeserved reputation
I did not read the comments posted by others so if this one happens to be similar to other posts, it is not intentional. I am an animal lover and I especially love dogs and I cannot understand the bad press that any dog with the classification "pit bull." The fact of the matter is the quantity of these attacks are highly exaggerated to make people believe they happen on a regular basis, similar to shark attacks when in fact there is probably only a handfull of attacks each year if that many. More people die from being struck by lightning than attacks by these dogs and shark bites combined. Furthermore, nobody seems to take into account how the animal that supposedly attacked a person was treated. It is a fact that most of the pit bulls that have attacked or killed a human were in fact abused, neglected or raised in such a brutal fashion (usually for fighting) that its no wonder the animal attacked, having a rough backround would leave it bitter with humans and quite frankly not knowing anything else. However no one seems to take in account the dog's backround of how it was raised; its the dog's fault because it was born, it’s the dog‘s fault because the owner takes advantage of the dog‘s reputation for their usually illegal projects. This scenario is not much different than a child who's parent neglect or abuse them that they tend to be rather bitter and have a negative point of view of the world based on his/her experiences or they turn to a life of crime whether its drug use, theft or in some cases murder sometimes even mass murder. For some reason it appears that when an animal (any animal) attacks a human despite being mentally inferior to humans working solely on instinct that SOMEHOW upon killing a human it is supposed to know better and a result the animal is usually destroyed along with many others for being that species. If animals could hold grudges like that against us for every time we hunted or killed one of them, humans would have probably been extinct a long time ago. Anyways I kind of drifted off topic. Nobody seems to seems to realize the fact that if the dog is raised and treated a certain ways that its going to come out a certain way just like a person would. THE AKC highly recommends the breed and I think I can safely say they have a high say and actually know the facts from myths. There is a myth that a pit bull has a bite of 30,000 PSI. That has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. A crocodile who has one of the strongest bites in the animal kingdom has average bite of 3,000 PSI and you are going to convince me that an 85 lb dog can bite harder than a 2,000 lb crocodile? I don’t think so. I’ve seen too many families own a pit bull who treat their animal properly and the animal is more gentle than you can imagine to just sit by and watch this dog be unjustly prosecuted usually based on limited or ignored facts and highly exaggerated myths. The media, just like any other problem s in this world take something that maybe accounts for 1% of a whole and flip it around to where the negative image supposedly accounts for nearly 100% of the whole. A perfect example of how the statistics are flipped around would be the issue of teens who supposedly kill because of watching a movie or playing a game when 99% of young people who may be exposed to violence/sex in entertainment turn into law biding citizens despite the media tries so hard to portray the opposite and its unfair that a law biding society has to yield because maybe the 1% will take something the wrong way and do something bad. This is a great comparison to the position the pit bull is in; how the whole breed suffers an exaggerated and pretty much false reputation for incidents that portray to less than 1% of the pit bull population. Even those who are responsible for injuring or even killing someone I fail to understand how that can possibly reflect then tire breed. Its like saying if a white man murders someone for no apparent reason that all white men are potential killers based on that one incident. But we do categorize white men based on that incident because we know that would be flat out ludicrous. So why do we do it to animals? Pit bulls are not bad dogs. If raised and trained properly they are the ideal household pet a fact again also acknowledged by the AKC who again knows more about dog breeds than just about anyone else on the planet. I have shared this viewpoint with numerous people and its amazing the folks with two brain cells in between them seem to acknowledge the facts while the ignorant who honestly cannot back up their position with facts or even an argument of any kind besides saying “because”. Thank you for reading this I apologize for the long length and possibly going off topic once or twice in order to make some comparisons. I just hope some folks will read what I wrote and maybe learn something about this breed that may allow them to shift their viewpoint. (This section contributed by user 205.246.157.238.)
i'm a witness that the pit bull really does have a bad reputation. i was very leary when my son brought home a amercian pit bull terrior as he call her the red nose. i was afraid to have this type of breed of dogs, but now i know that all the bad press on the pit was truly unfair she grew on me quickly and now its love at first sight. she is very protective of me but that common of any breed. one thing i must say is that she is the smartest of any dog that i have had in the last 45years. mae 7-17-2006
[edit] The 'fawn pit bull' picture
Are you sure that's an actual APBT? It looks an awfully lot like a Bullmastiff. It's not really a good picture, either; you can hardly see the dog's head.
That dog isn't nearly large enough to be an adult Bull Mastiff. The proportions aren't quite right either. According to the source website for the image, that dog is an APBT named "Bubu"[1]. Dick Clark 16:58, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
>Unfortunately there are many unscrupulous breeders and buyers who think that even dogs need to be supersized. That breeding for quality is old fashioned and your dog should be gimmicky. No, I don't approve of dog fighting, but when a dog no longer serves a utilitarian purpose it soon succumbs to breeder fancy. I don't know if that's a APBT or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is. Nor would I be surprised if it has Bullmastiff or AB blood in it. Most APBT's that have attacked humans weren't bred by committed breeders of pit-men, they were bred by thugs (who think gaurd work and dog-fighting are the same thing/require same traits).
[edit] Nice revamp.
Thanks, mystery editor.
[edit] This has one version of the breed's history.
The other has it that the apbt is the living embodiment of the ancient alaunt and other proto-mastiffs. This is the dog that actually fought with bulls and is the true bulldog. We should expand the rather boring history given in this article with this alternative viewpoint. BulldogPete 07:21, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
- I would have to agree with the post above, breeds like this were bred for bull fighting. I don't really think they are meant for dog fighting as they bite and hold, are pretty muscle bound and have bodies that are clearly reinforced for blunt trauma. They no doubt can fight other dogs but I don’t think that was their purpose in the beginning, I also think that it is more of a wrestling match with bullfighting dogs going at it, with deaths being relatively unlikely. On the other hand the little Bedlington terrier and Irish terrier (known as ‘red devil’) have loose skin (the announcer during a dog show said this one time, so I checked my Airedale and she does have lots of loose skin compared to my friends dogs!), protective fur that kind of hides where the body actually is, quick lithe bodies that would cause nasty wounds if they bit and whipped their body. They also have nasty long sharp teeth, it is known that Bedlingtons were used to fight badgers; I just saw a show where a fully grown coyote or wolf got schooled by a badger. It is also interesting to note that I have found that ‘pit-bulls’, bull terriers and other heavily built dogs that seem like they would be bullfighters have a fairly even disposition while terriers seem to be high-strung and well, kind of insane. I think the problem with ‘pit-bulls’ is the owners not the breed itself. I guess my question is: Why would bull fighting dogs and dogs meant for dogfighting have the same characteristics? Aren’t the two activities quite different? I mean I saw a bull terrier or staffie fighting a bull on RealTV and it looked damn good at it, and it kind of occurred to me.
To answer the question, you'd have to go back into a pitbull's family tree. The APBT (and the Staffie, too) are direct descendants of the English Bulldog. The original bulldog didn't look like the froggy one we know today, but rather was much bigger and bred for bull baiting. It was bred to clamp on to the end of the bull's snout and never let go, and bets were taken to see how long the dog lasted. However, the breed was lacking an ingredient common in modern pits: a never say die attitude. That is where and why the terrier lineage was added. Terriers are dogs that were originally bred to never back down, to ignore pain, and to act quickly under fire. In a ring a pure bulldog would be useless because he would wimp out too quickly and his size would make him a little bit ungainly (it takes a little longer for a bullmastiff to turn around than a pitbull, but that little space of time would give an opponent the upper hand.) It is also of note that the terrier bloodline would have allowed his master to participate in ratting as 19th century London or Dublin would have been full of them and the dog could also provide a means for regular work.
In summation, the disciplines are similar, but not entirely the same. What is true is that the bull/terrier breeds of today have all the hallmarks of what a dogman wanted: brute strength and an instinct to never let go from the bulldog, but speed and smarts from the terrier. Shadowcat 60
[edit] Stubby
The section linking to famous pit bulls includes a link to Sergeant Stubby, but Stubby's article claims that he is "of unknown breed." I suggest the link be removed if this is the case. Boubelium 07:37, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
