These excellent but overly-maligned doggehs are due some, that’s for sure. But, as those of us who have had pitties before already know, almost all of what the congenitally dishonest, pig ignorant “they” say about the breed isn’t remotely true.
The Jews of the Canine World
Pit bulls have been unfairly stereotyped as genetically dangerous monsters. Sound familiar?I’ve always loved dogs that look like pit bulls: wide and smiling faces, goofy expressions, broad chests, sturdy bodies, short coats, enthusiastic tails. I grew up not knowing about dog fighting, or about this breed’s vicious reputation. My terror was reserved for German shepherds (my equally frightened little brother tremulously called them “sheffers”), with their pointy, mean faces and loud barks. There were some territorial ones in the yards in my Providence, Rhode Island, neighborhood.
But after moving to New York, I came to understand that pit bulls are hated. My little East Village copy shop, where we got Josie’s bat mitzvah invitations, has a big, short-coated, wide-chested, flat-faced dog behind the counter. His name is Curtis. He comes when you call and accepts head-pats with dignity. But when I asked the owner, Santo, what kind of dog Curtis was, he hesitated. “He’s a mix,” Santo said. “Terrier, other things … pit bull.” He clearly was reluctant to say those two words. He thought I’d recoil.
You know what people say about pit bulls: Violence is in their genes. They have double rows of teeth. Their jaws can unhinge like a snake’s. Their jaws lock after they bite. They don’t feel pain the way other dogs do. In 1987, U.S. News and World Report called them “the most dangerous dog in America,” able to “chomp through chain-link fences.” The Guardian called pit bulls “dogs of war who can bite through concrete.” Time called them “time bombs on legs” and started a story on them with a quote from The Hound of the Baskervilles:
Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face.
A friend had her family dog genetically tested, and when she discovered it had some pit bull lineage, she gave it away. Her kids sobbed. But what if the dog just lost it one day? That’s what pit bulls do, right?
None of this, of course, is true. Bronwen Dickey’s fascinating new book Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon charts the evolution of pit bull stereotyping. (It begins with a quote from André Gide: “There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.”) In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pit bulls were considered the family-friendliest dogs. Dogs that looked like them served in the Battle of Gettysburg and in Normandy. One accompanied Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in their covered-wagon journey across the prairie. Helen Keller owned and adored one. Another (named Votes!) accompanied suffragist Virginia Watrous on the campaign trail in 1915. Still another starred in the “His Master’s Voice” campaign for RCA and another in the “Our Gang” kiddie comedies. Dickey observes that pit bulls were then seen as “quintessentially American: good-natured, brave, resilient, and dependable.” But within a few decades, they’d become DNA-driven vicious beasts, “biologically hardwired to kill.”
My first dog was a pittie, as was my last, along with a few others in between—the last one being just the sweetest ol’ girl ever to walk on four legs and shit in the backyard and tremble like a leaf in a gale during thunderstorms: the late, great Cookie (Monster). A photo of my dear, departed friend: 
Pretty girl, no? When I took her to the Gastonia, NC animal shelter to be put down at not quite 16 years of age, after the attendants had put her in the little cart and wheeled her off and inside to do the dirty deed I sat out in the parking lot and cried like a disgruntled infant for well over two hours. I still can hardly believe my darling pupster is gone, and I miss her still.
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I know of people here where I love that have a few and they love them