At my local community radio station, a pit bull puppy was found; presumably lost. There was some discussion about what should be done with it, should it be handed over to animal shelter? During the discussion, one of the volunteers has this to say about it:
Calling animal control for a Pit Bull in this county is a death sentence for the dog. They check for a chip, and if they don’t find one they immediately kill the dog. The breed is considered dangerous and a nuisance by ordinance and they will not adopt one out.
Having been through rescuing a Pit Bull myself I have to tell you that finding a home for one and keeping it out of the hands of the dog fight people is tough. I had one that I rescued from the house behind Early Bird boarded for close to seven months while I interviewed potential adopters, rejecting all of them that didn’t reject the dog because they either didn’t check out or immediately began patting the dog down and commenting on “really nice muscle tone” and how “well developed” they were as they drooled. I terminated interviews on the spot with close to half a dozen when it became clear what they wanted the dog for.
The sad fact of the matter is that Pit Bulls are a menace, not because they’re bad dogs but because they’re a “macho dog” that macho people get because they want to walk the macho dog and show off to everyone that they can handle a Pit. The problem is that they lose interest in the dog that they really didn’t want to begin with (they’re meant to be a prop, not a pet) and start letting the dog walk itself. The result is that either the dog gets killed by a car or truck on the road, by Animal Control if they’re picked up, or worst case they kill a human when they join up with a pack of other dogs and instinct takes over.
And the Pit Bull puppy mills continue to crank them out because there’s a market for them. For every macho person that loses interest there are two or three more that decide to express themselves by getting a Pit.
The only suggestion that I would have had to offer if I had seen this in time would be to put it in the station’s dog run, put out some food and water, then start trying to locate the owner or place him/her with a rescue group. I’ll warn you in advance that the rescue groups are completely clogged with dogs and they don’t want any more. Most of the ones that I called told me to take the dog to a vet and have them put down as the most expedient and humane way to rid the planet of yet another unwanted Pit Bull. No, I’m not exaggerating, that’s what I was told, over and over. That’s why we boarded the one that we rescued for so long.
I did some more research and found out that Pit Bulls have been discriminated against in many parts of the world. The article I found online about breed specific laws gives you a wealth of information about this issue.
The whole issue is murky for a host of reasons. First being the definition of ‘Pit Bull’ itself. As it turns out, Pit Bull is not a breed of dog. It a generic term applied to dogs used in dog fight, and are generally believed to be aggressive, and hence dangerous to human when left unsupervised.
Wikipedia’s definition of a Pit Bull is:
Pit bull is a term commonly used to describe several types of dogs with similar physical characteristics. Its use in media is often vague and rarely descriptive of specific breeds. There are several physically similar breeds that are often termed “pit bull”, including the American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, the Bull Terrier, the Perro de Presa Canario, Cane Corso, and Argentine Dogos.These breeds are usually not included by name in any Breed Specific Legislation (see below), but are sometimes included because of a broad definition and confusion as to what a pit bull actually is.
So it turns out that the term Pit Bull is somewhat of profiling, much like the profiling that is done by the U.S. Homeland Security, and the FAA where amazingly some (specific) people seem to always be randomly selected for security checks every time they fly.
A related legal ambiguity is that if Pit Bulls are not a breed and are not clearly defined, then how do you implement a law against the breed that (a) doesn’t exist, and (b) has no clear definition. The argument for it is typically the argument [Defining Obscenity] [Legal Proceedings] about defining ‘hard-core’ pornography, which goes something like this: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . .”
But in the middle of all this confusion the dogs have been left unprotected. It is important to remember that dogs are human-created species through selective breeding of members from the Grey Wolf species. That thrusts a moral responsibility on us as to how we should treat them. If we choose to make laws about them, then we should ensure that these laws are ‘fair’, much like the laws about humans should be fair (of course, torture must be legalized in national interest, and all the Arabs and Arab-looking must be randomly selected to additional security checks on all flights).
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