sweet article on pitt bulls in New York Times

[samsmama]

New York Times
January 18, 2004

ESSAY
The Dog in the Fight
By CHARLES SIEBERT

hese are dark days, indeed, for one of New York City's best known and much maligned residents, the pit bull. The dog has long been a fixture in the tabloids and local news for the inevitable attacks that result from their corrupted rearing. But perhaps underscoring how debased the beast has become is the latest outcry for its banishment, spawned by the misdeed of another breed entirely, the Rottweiler, one of whose kind mauled a 3-year-old boy in the Bronx in October. (The dog's owner, it turned out, was a former convict and parole violator.) The incident sparked the by-now familiar and sadly hollow outcry to ban ''bad breeds,'' as one local tabloid referred to them. In some cities, certain breeds can be singled out as dangerous and required to wear muzzles. Many municipalities across the U.S. have banned pit bulls outright, Denver, Miami-Dade County and Cincinnati among them. And now a number of New York State lawmakers are pushing to overturn a current state law that prohibits cities and towns from banning specific dogs. In a single stroke, this course of action makes the dog the scapegoat for the true culprits while also ensuring that it remains, precisely because of its ''outlaw'' status, the breed of choice for inner-city wannabe hoods and backwoods anarchists alike. The pit bull's image has become so skewed that New York City Animal Care and Control, the city's animal-welfare agency, recently decided to give the dog a public relations makeover by renaming it the ''New Yorkie.''

I took in a pit bull once, an orphan -- like so many of his kind -- of human cruelty. We met one fall afternoon three years ago while I was walking with my dogs up Eastern Parkway toward my apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The pit bull was coming straight toward us, although still a good distance up the parkway, when I spotted him. You learn to keep a keen eye out for ''pits'' in my neighborhood. I stopped at the nearest crosswalk in hopes of getting to the other side, but seeing that the light was against me, I gathered both my dogs' leashes into my left hand, reached with my right for the Swiss Army knife I used to take with me precisely for such encounters (I now use pepper spray) and steadied myself for the worst.

All white but for one very endearing light brown spot over his left eye, he moved, I remember, with a forthright gait, striding toward us along the promenade like a regular citizen of the world. I was just about to open my knife. Then I noticed a broad ring of tarnish around the pit's neck, where his collar had been, and flecks of blood and scarring along his flank, and I immediately began to let my defenses down.

Perversely, I knew not to be afraid of this one precisely because he'd been bloodied and abandoned. It happens all the time to the ''nice ones'' -- those that fail to become fierce despite the ''instructive'' beatings and special baiting, things like feeding them hot peppers and glass shards, all by way of toughening them up either for the fighting ring or for their more general role as animate macho ''hood'' ornament. According to New York City Animal Care and Control, which is contracted by the city's Health Department and therefore mandated, unlike the A.S.P.C.A. or the Humane Society or the North Shore Animal League, to accept all relinquished animals, more than 6,000 pit bulls are taken into its shelters every year in New York City. Ninety percent of them aren't adopted and have to be put down. The abandoned in my neighborhood are often found tied to lampposts along the parkway or are let loose in nearby Prospect Park, some of these strays to be set upon later by their ''successful'' counterparts, whose owners purposefully let them loose for practice killings.

The oft-repeated line ''There are no bad dogs, just bad owners'' has been accurately applied to a number of breeds other than the pit bull. The Rottweiler -- which currently shares the pit bull's dubious status as emissary of our baser urges -- was originally bred as a herd dog and is cited in any number of canine guidebooks for being, like the pit bull or the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, to which the pit is related, particularly affectionate with children. Similar words are often used to describe the German shepherd, the Doberman pinscher and the boxer, the menacing breeds of the postwar era. This is in large part because of the co-optation of their skills by the military and by the police (and by overzealous civilian owners, who, subliminally or not, traded on those indelible images of bared fangs before the flailing flanks of civil rights marchers and antiwar protesters). But what the proponents of bans of specific dog breeds fail to recognize is that a given breed is incidental to the cruder human impulses it is made to serve: the illicit thrill of bloody fighting rings, or of simply having the baddest dog on the block. Ban one breed, and there will be another to take its place. Ban, or at least crack down on, the human abuses of these animals by enforcing more strictly the existing laws against such abuse, and all breeds revert to their better natures. Consider the history of a another corrupted pedigree (since redeemed), the Akita. For centuries the Akita was so extensively used as a fighting dog in Japan that it nearly became extinct. The government interceded, prohibiting the use of Akitas for the bloody spectacle of the ring, allowing the dog to achieve its current distinction as an ideal ''companion dog,'' as one guidebook describes it, ''docile . . . careful, affectionate, intelligent, courageous.''

A citywide information campaign enlisting the help of the average citizen would go a long way toward ferreting out the violators, whose activities are, by their very nature, conspicuous. Just two days after the call by state officials for the Elijah law (named after the boy mauled in the Bronx), police officers who were arresting a Bronx resident on an unrelated charge stumbled upon what appeared to be a pit-bull fight-training compound behind the man's house. It included cinder-block stalls, heavy metal chains with thick canvas collars and a canine exercise treadmill.

I'm not certain what it was precisely that prompted me to take in that pit bull three years ago. I stood there at the crosswalk watching the pit nuzzle my two dogs -- both mixed-breed, adopted strays. Then he stared up at me with such knowing, clearly asking eyes, and I knew I was sunk.

My wife watched in disbelief as we all came through the front door. I gave him a bath and brushing, all the while keeping a keen eye out for any indications of a mean streak, that vicious inner core supposedly endemic to his breed. Nothing. Day after day, I watched him play with my dogs and others in the park without incident. It soon became clear that what I had allowed into my life was nothing more than a bighearted bungler whose apparent enthusiasm at the prospect of a life with a nonhurtful owner nearly cost him the chance at one.

The last time I saw Vic -- the name given to him by a friend who took him in for a brief period -- was at a country kennel in Quebec, a few miles from where my wife and I spend our summers. We had concluded that we couldn't handle three dogs back in Brooklyn. The owner of the kennel, meanwhile, vowed she'd find someone to adopt him. And just before Christmas word finally came that, after two prospective adopters had returned Vic because of his obsessive barking at cows and hay bales, a dog walker at a nearby animal shelter had decided to take him in.

I choose to believe that this arrangement has worked out fine. It would hurt too much to find out otherwise, unable as I am even now to put out of my mind the look Vic gave me the day I dropped him off. He'd always stare me right in the eye and give a quick lick when we were together and the world, in his mind, was right. This time, though, I got just a tight-lipped turn of his wide, noble head, a look that -- given what he sensed was about to happen and what I knew already had to him and his kind -- I can only describe as disappointment.




Charles Siebert is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author, most recently, of ''A Man After His Own Heart: A True Story,'' which will be published in the spring.

[Guest Anonymous]

:cry: that was so sweet! lol New Yorkie!