Pit Bulls: Loyal Pets or Vicious Fighters

Pet O' Mine is a local and free pet newsletter, they put out once a month...Now I was debating on putting this in positive press, because though in some ways, the article is positive. I believe they have somethings wrong as well. I want to write a letter to the Editor about it, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't writing "false" info. So I thought I'd let you all read it, and see if you found the same problems with it, as I did....

Pet O' Mine: Pit Bulls: Loyal Pets or Vicious Fighters

It's a pdf file, just in case you can't get that. If not, I'll try to find a way for you to read it.

 

I don't believe part of this statement
“It is all in the dog’s bloodline. It is not in how they are raised.” says Simmons, a nationally known dog fighting and cruelty investigator. “They are not trained to fight. They are bred to fight. You can’t take any dog, any pit bill, and train them to fight. It has to be in their bloodline.”

The article goes on to say before you buy a APBT be sure to check the bloodlines because you could have a fighter that will not make a good pet.
I've owned gamebred APBTs before and thats not true. Some can be really great pets.

First off, buying a pup because it is from gamebred Bloodlines doesn't necessarily mean that the pup will be game. Your chances of it being game are strong but I know that you can breed 2 gamebred dogs and have a litter where maybe 1-2 are great game dogs.

Secondly the article says "It is not in how they are raised" I think alot has
to do with how its raised, socialization, training, if it is kenneled or not. In my experience or it could be coincidence. But the ones I had kenneled (not all) seemed to be more aggressive than my in house ones.

Bottom line, you have to know the dog. Gamebred or not they could be great pets.

 

that's what I was thinking as well. I was going to write in and let them know that you are less likely to be attacked by a Gamebred "pit bull". They use a beagle attacking a rabbit as a metaphor, and you'd think they'd realize since a beagle will "attack" a rabbit, but doesn't become "vicious" toward humans because of it. Why would an APBT become "dangerous" to a human if it is "vicious" to another dog?

 

My sentiments exactly.

 

Well, another thing to point out is the fact that they stated the APBT was originally bred for herding and guarding. That is WRONG. They were never bred for that to my knowledge.

The reason the fighting bloodlines, as called, was mentioned badly is because it came from an ASPCA rep. Basically, they want to see APBTs in general destroyed anyways.

I suggest explaining the difference in Human Aggression and Dog Aggression. Also, MAYBE...maybe... explain how old time dogmen would cull HA dogs, how they would wash the opponents dog, and how they were in the ring the whole match. This could help disspell the myth about game dogs being human aggressive. Like I said, you might want to think your wording out on that one so you don't look like someone who praises matching dogs. If that happens, they will likely disregard your letter and/or worse.

 

What a horrible, misleading article...amazing.

 

Still missing the point that animal agression and people agression are different things. I agree that someone needs to tell them that you are less likely to be attacked by a game bred pit bull than a non game bred one.

 

amen to that!!

but then again, it also depends on what kind of breeding it is, if there's too much inbreeding, which i have seem cause some dogs to be really skytsofrentic, one second they are your friend the next they growling at you, but i've also seen this with non inbred dogs, it's just how the person raised them. so i think that how a dog is raised can be a bigger factor than the breeding.