What People Dont Want You to Know About Pit Bulls
from the magazine
Scared of Pit Bulls? You'd Better Be!
Bred for violence, these dogs can wreck a neighborhood's quality of life as surely equally prostitutes or drug dealers.
Jump 1999
Pinformation technology bulls drove my family from the Bronx. My pregnant wife and I had moved to Bedford Park, off Mosholu Parkway, belatedly in 1997. Though the neighborhood had rough edges, we got used to information technology, at to the lowest degree for a while. Afterwards our son was born, all the same—and as spring blossomed, and we ventured outside more often—we found ourselves growing ever more frightened of dangerous dogs. Pit-bull owners had converted the little park in front of our flat building into a domestic dog-training footing, where they goaded their animals into attacking 1 another or taught them to hang from tree branches to strengthen their jaws and their tenacity. Non surprisingly, when the dogs were running wild, the neighborhood'south immature mothers gathered upwards their children and fled. Seniors cowered together on a few benches. Like the mothers, owners of small dogs waited until the park was pit-bull-free before taking them for a walk. The park had been lost every bit a public space, impoverishing the neighborhood.
The dogs had taken over more than the park. Walking down 204th Street or by the gone- to-seed low-income housing abutting the Metro-North Botanical Garden stop, we regularly ran a gauntlet of thugs flaunting spike-collared pit bulls, bespeaking a world of anarchy and dread. As a friend and I walked abode one spring night, nosotros saw 3 stocking-capped toughs slouched confronting a concatenation-link fence, barely restraining a thick- necked, snarling pit bull. My eye raced, until I noticed 2 young cops walking in our direction, just beyond the bad dudes. My relief was brusk-lived. "It's a full moon, and dogs go crazy in the fooool moon," one of the thugs howled wildly, as he permit the pit bull lunge to the end of his leash at the cops. A confrontation seemed imminent, but the two officers nervously crossed the street to avoid it. "I judge we know who won that boxing," my friend glumly noted, and nosotros crossed the street, too.
After a rash of unsettling incidents—including a tornado of eight unleashed pit bulls swirling across the park and the roughshod mangling of our neighbor's small mutt by another loose pit bull—nosotros decided this was no place for a babe, and we left. Nosotros had learned that intimidating dogs tin impair a neighborhood's quality of life and give the sense that no one is in charge as as much every bit drug dealing, prostitution, or aggressive panhandling.
Though dog advocates would dispute information technology, our fright was justified. According to the Centers for Disease Control, dogs bite four million to v million Americans every year. Few attacks are fatal (25 in 1996), but serious injuries—everything from a gash in the arm requiring a few stitches to severed easily and fractured skulls—keep to rise and now stand at more than 750,000 annually, up nearly 40 percent from 1986. Dog bites are one of the top causes of non-fatal injuries in the nation.
Children are the well-nigh frequent victims, accounting for threescore percent of the domestic dog bites and 20 of the 25 dog-bite fatalities in 1996. Dog attacks are now the No. ane reason that children wind upward in hospital emergency rooms. Incredibly, nearly half of all American kids have been bitten by the age of 12. The Humane Club of the United States estimates that more than $100 million gets spent yearly treating dog bites in the nation'due south emergency rooms, and U.S. insurance companies paid out $250 meg in dog-bite liability claims in 1996.
Pit bulls and pit-bull crosses (non always easy to distinguish) take caused more than a third of the nation's dog-bite fatalities since 1979 and a comparable proportion of serious injuries. The rising number of attacks, and the unease pit bulls and other dangerous dogs crusade in public spaces, have spurred many municipalities to crack down with legislation ranging from muzzle laws to bans on pit bulls and certain other breeds.
Northwardew York City, with a meg dogs, conforms to these national trends. In 1997, the Department of Health reported seven,075 dog bites in the urban center and some 1,000 complaints virtually frightening dogs. Gotham police and other regime had to round upward 892 biting dogs in 1997, 200 more than than the year earlier. Of these, 294—33 percent—were pit bulls or pit-bull mixes, though they brand upwards only an estimated 15 pct of the city's dogs.
Recent pit-bull attacks in New York City take hit the headlines. In i horrific incident a little over a yr ago, four unleashed pit bulls swept, barking and growling, through Richmond Hill, tearing at anyone in their path, as screaming passersby took comprehend on pinnacle of cars or fled indoors. Two of the enraged animals rampaged through a supermarket on 135th Street before police shot them to death. Powerful tranquilizer darts downed the other ii dogs. Three people were seriously injured in the frenzy. Other recent attacks were no less violent. In late 1996, three pit bulls mauled an 85-twelvemonth-old Bronx human to expiry. In 1997, two pit bulls severely injured a 12-year-old Brooklyn daughter, and other attacks left a seven-year-erstwhile Queens male child with a os-deep wound to his leg, and an 11- yr-onetime Queens boy with a shredded arm. Pit bulls can inflict such terrible damage considering their massive skulls and powerful jaws give them almost super-canine bitter power.
Pit-bull-inflicted injuries in New York Metropolis will almost certainly fasten up because of a senseless new federal law ending a threescore-yr official ban on animals in housing projects. The New York City Housing Dominance long looked the other way as project residents took in pets. Merely two years ago, after tenants barraged a newly installed quality-of-life hotline with dog-related complaints, ranging from organized canis familiaris fighting to pit-balderdash attacks on other pets, the potency launched a campaign against vicious animals in public housing. Intimidating dogs had many residents, especially seniors, living in a "state of fear and terror," every bit authority spokesman Hilly Gross put it. Though ambiguous wording in the federal legislation may allow the potency to retain some restrictions, the new law invites disaster by permitting lots of pit bulls inside biting altitude of lots of children and one-time folks.
Pit bulls are also wreaking havoc on the city's public property. Every bit Manhattan Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe observes, "Some pit-bull owners train their animals to fight by having them lock their jaws on rubber swings in children's playgrounds, which very quickly destroys the swings." The cost to taxpayers: $250,000 annually. "Perhaps more ominously," Benepe adds, "these owners take started to use young trees to railroad train the pit bulls."
Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, aware of the property damage and sensitive to complaints from "terrorized" parents, joggers, and senior citizens about roving canines in city parks, now is enforcing the city's leash law, requiring owners to keep their dogs leashed between ix AM and 9 PM, unless they are using ane of the city'south canis familiaris runs. The new campaign, targeting Fundamental and Riverside Parks, issues $100 fines for start offenders and doubles the punishment, up to $1,000, for each subsequent criminal offence. And then far, despite howls from some pet owners, spot checks show the per centum of unleashed dogs down dramatically, equally owners accept gotten the message. Mail to the Parks Department has run iii-to-one in favor of strict enforcement.
Due southtern's initiative follows closely on the heels of the Giuliani administration'south proposed new dangerous-canis familiaris legislation, announced before this year. The mayor'southward proposal jacks up fines for owning a vicious dog, makes it easier for the city to label a domestic dog dangerous, and requires pit-bull owners to purchase $100,000 in liability insurance before they tin become a domestic dog license. Predictably, the proposal has enraged canis familiaris owners.
According to New York City Health Commissioner Neal Cohen, the metropolis needs the new law because of its loftier number of dog-inflicted injuries. The existing dangerous-dog police force, on the books since 1991, has been ineffective in practise, because it requires the Department of Wellness, which adjudicates dog-bite cases, to show that a dog wasn't "provoked" earlier it tin can label the brute dangerous and require it to be muzzled or impounded. As Cohen observes, "It is almost incommunicable to define what a detail canis familiaris subjectively perceives equally a `provocation.' " The police besides requires lengthy hearings earlier the urban center can take action. Equally then-Corporation Counsel Paul Crotty complained after a pit- balderdash attack in 1997 killed a Queens man, "Information technology'southward a dopey police force that puts the emphasis on protection of due-process rights of dogs . . . rather than on the protection of people."
But those priorities are just what domestic dog advocates want. Lisa Weisberg, vice president of regime affairs of the ASPCA, testified against the new law, arguing that its "proposed emptying of a hearing process to fairly and adequately determine whether or not a domestic dog is truly dangerous is extremely agonizing and deprives a dog owner of his/her due process." In fact, domestic dog advocates often embrace a strangely askew, doggy-centric view of the world. Gordon Carvill, president of the American Dog Owners Clan, is a instance in signal. When I described to him the fear my wife and other young mothers in our Bronx neighborhood had nearly using the public park when pit bulls were on the loose, he dedicated the dogs. "Some people are afraid of whatever kind of dog—you know that," he admonished. "Dogs know when someone is agape, and they're apt to be more than aggressive." And then the mothers are the problem.
Carvill seconds Weisberg's objection that the city's proposal threatens the due-process protections of pet owners. But the law'southward biggest defect, he says, is that it singles out a specific breed, in its requirement that pit-balderdash owners buy liability insurance. (The metropolis's desire to regulate pit bulls is in seeming disharmonize with a 1997 state law, similar to those 11 other states have passed, that confined breed-specific local legislation.) For Carvill, all dogs are created equal; dissimilar breeds don't have different hereditary characteristics. "At that place is no dog born in this earth with a predisposition to aggression," he firmly states.
But he's wrong, and dead wrong if we're talking about pit bulls. All men may exist created equal, only not all dogs. Says Katherine Houpt, director of the Animal Behavior Clinic at Cornell and author of Domestic Animal Behavior: "Different breeds have genetic predispositions to certain kinds of behavior, though that tin be influenced by how they are raised. The pit bull is an innately aggressive breed, ofttimes owned past someone who wants an ambitious dog, and then they're going to encourage information technology."
Pit bulls have been bred specifically to be aggressive. They're descended from the at present- extinct old English "bulldogge," a big, tenacious breed used in the fell early- nineteenth-century sport of balderdash baiting, in which rowdy spectators watched dogs tear apart an enraged bull. Victorian reformers, concerned about the coarsening effect balderdash baiting had on its devotees, banned it past the early 1830s, but enterprising bull baiters simply migrated to an equally bloody sport: organized canis familiaris fighting.
As Carl Semencic, author of several informative books on guard dogs, and a big pit-bull fan, describes information technology, the bulldogge owners fabricated a hitting discovery: "a cross between the bulldogge and any of the game [i.e., brave and tenacious] and relatively powerful terriers of the day produced a game, powerful, agile, and smaller, more capable opponent in the dog pits." These bull-and-terrier crosses became renowned for fighting prowess and soon were the only dogs used in organized domestic dog fighting in England and afterward in the United states of america. To preserve the bull-and-terrier'due south pugnacious traits, the dogs were bred merely to dogs of the same cross. Thus was born the pit-bull terrier, "the most capable fighting dog known to modern man," Semencic enthuses.
Though breeders, realizing the pit bull was an attractive dog when it wasn't scrapping, bred a less feisty version—the American Staffordshire terrier ("Pete" of the old Our Gang comedy series is a well-known representative)—the pit-bull terrier is first and last a fighting dog. Its breeding history separates it from other tough dogs like Doberman pinschers and rottweilers, which have been bred to guard their masters and their property. Pit bulls are genetically wired to impale other dogs.
The pit bull'southward unusual breeding history has produced some bizarre behavioral traits, de- scribed by The Economist's science editor in an article published a few years ago, at the peak of a heated British controversy over unsafe dogs that saw the pit bull banned in England. First, the pit bull is quicker to anger than nearly dogs, probably due to the breed'southward unusually high level of the neurotransmitter L-tyrosine. Second, pit bulls are frighteningly tenacious; their attacks often last for fifteen minutes or longer, and nothing—hoses, violent blows or kicks—can easily stop them. That'south because of the 3rd behavioral anomaly: the breed's remarkable insensitivity to pain. Well-nigh dogs beaten in a fight will submit the next fourth dimension they see the victor. Not a defeated pit bull, who volition tear into his onetime vanquisher. This, too, has to do with brain chemistry. The body releases endorphins as a natural painkiller. Pit bulls seem actress-sensitive to endorphins and may generate higher levels of the chemical than other dogs. Endorphins are also addictive: "The dogs may be junkies, seeking pain and so they can become the endorphin buzz they crave," The Economist suggests.
Finally, nearly dogs warn y'all before they attack, growling or barking to tell you how angry they are—"and so they don't have to fight," ASPCA advisor and animal geneticist Stephen Zawistowski stresses. Not the pit balderdash, which attacks without warning. Most dogs, also, will bow to signal that they want to frolic. Over again, not the pit bull, which may follow an plain playful bow with a lethal assail. In short, opposite to the writings of Vicki Hearne, a well-known essayist on animals who—in a bizarre simply emotionally charged confusion—equates breed-specific laws against pit bulls every bit a kind of "racist propaganda," the pit bull is a breed autonomously.
Pit-balderdash expert Semencic makes a more sophisticated argument as to why pit bulls shouldn't be singled out for regulation. Pit bulls, he says, were bred non to be aggressive to people. "A pit bull that attacked humans would take been useless to canis familiaris fighters," he contends; "the dogs needed to be handled by strangers in the middle of a fight." Any dog that went after a handler was immediately "culled"—that is, put to death. Just Semencic's argument assumes that the culling of man-aggressive dogs is still going on—which it isn't. Every bit Robin Kovary, a New York-based dog breeder and pit-bull fancier, acknowledges, "Once the discussion got out, twenty years agone or so, to youths who wanted a tough dog to show off with, the breed passed into less than responsible hands—kids who wanted the dogs to be as aggressive as they could be." Geneticist Zawistowski gives the result: "Irresponsible breeders have let the dogs' block against being aggressive to people disappear. They've created a kind of pit balderdash with what I phone call `undifferentiated assailment.' " A Milwaukee man learned this the hard way in Jan, when he tried to break up a fight between his two pit bulls and had one forearm ripped off and the other so badly mauled that doctors later had to amputate it.
Yet Kovary is at to the lowest degree partially correct when she says, "It's the two-legged beast, not the iv-legged one, we take to worry about." One needs nature and nurture to create a truly nasty dog. Raised responsibly, the pit balderdash'due south good side can come up to the fore. "Pit bulls tin be playful, intelligent, able-bodied, loyal, and useful in sports," Kovary explains. Only pit bulls have go enmeshed in the brutality of underclass culture, magnifying the breed's predisposition to aggression. "In the wrong hands," Kovary warns, "pit bulls can be bad news."
Abundant prove of possessor irresponsibility is on brandish at the Center for Animal Care and Control (CACC), a nonprofit shelter that opened in late 1994 in the heart of Castilian Harlem, to take over New York City animal command from the ASPCA. Pit bulls are its biggest problem. More than 60,000 animals, half of them dogs, entered the shelter last year. According to CACC official Kyle Burkhart, "more than than 50 percentage of the dogs are pit bulls or pit-balderdash mixes—a huge percentage." That works out to 40 or and so pit bulls a day, most of which have to be put downwards considering of their aggressiveness. Waiting in the CACC's vestibule, I got a firsthand await at the pit bull as a standard-consequence accessory to underclass life: toughs in baggy pants and stocking caps paraded in and out continuously, negotiating to get their impounded dogs back or to adopt new ones.
Three distinct classes of irresponsible—or, more accurately, calumniating—owners are the source of the CACC's flood of pit bulls. First are the drug dealers, who apply pit bulls, or pit-bull crosses, as peculiarly brutal sentinels. New York City cops had to shoot 83 dogs to death in 1997, most of them pit bulls guarding drug stashes. Burkhart showed me a few such sentinels in the center's dangerous-dog ward. Lunging confronting their metallic cages, these pit bulls were the nearly ferocious animals I'd e'er seen: pure brute fury. "This one would bite my head off if he had the take a chance," Burkhart said of ane Schwarzenegger-muscled dog, brought in from a police raid on a crack house. Intimidated, I kept as far from the cages every bit I could. "Some of the pit bulls coming in will really have their song cords removed in gild to surprise someone lurking around a crack house," Burkhart noted.
Dog-fighting rings also make full the CACC with abused animals. "Sometimes a raid on a dog- fighting ring brings us 20 or 30 pit bulls at a time," Burkhart tells me. The rings, moving clandestinely throughout the land, stage battles between pit bulls, sometimes to the death, as cheering spectators wager on the effect. The dogs the CACC receives from the raids will often be missing ears or will bear deep scars from their battles. Manhattan Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe isn't surprised at the savagery: "We regularly find dead pit bulls in the parks; on i occasion, nosotros found eight pit-bull carcasses dumped in Riverside Park. They'd been killed fighting other dogs."
It's an unsavory crowd that participates, whether as trainer or spectator, in the blood sport, says ASPCA humane-constabulary-enforcement officer George Watford. "The trainers preparing a pit bull for a fight throw a rope over a branch with a bag tied at the finish; inside the handbag will exist a live cat," Watford explains. "Y'all'll meet a domestic dog hanging from the bag, and it'll be a true cat he's killing within information technology, giving the pit bull the gustation for blood." The spectators are but equally bad, Watford says: "When we raid a ring, non only will there exist shotgun-armed lookouts, but nosotros'll search people and find drugs and weapons, and we'll always find people wanted for rape, murder, robbery charges."
Finally, the CACC gets pit bulls owned past teenagers and gang members—"young punks," Watford calls them—who raise the dogs to intimidate. "It's a macho thing," Watford says. "These punks will become into the typical park scenario, a `my dog is tougher than your dog' thing, in which they let the dogs fight." I recalled a Bronx mother screaming at two teen lowlifes fighting pit bulls in the park in forepart of our flat building. The teens, sporting military fatigues and shaved heads, ignored her and went on with their roughshod fun. Typically, these teens lose involvement in their brutalized—and unremarkably unneutered—dogs and permit them loose, swamping the city with stray pit bulls.
Due westhat should New York City do about its dangerous dogs? One possibility: ban the pit bull, as England has done. Unfortunately, thanks to the 1997 state law nixing breed- specific legislation, such a ban would entail a difficult battle for state permission. And if the city bans the pit balderdash, what's to end thugs from shifting to other breeds that can exist fabricated into weapons, such equally the Canary canis familiaris or the Dogo Argentino? Outlawing them all would be an extremely divisive policy.
What nigh the metropolis's idea of forcing pit-bull owners to buy pricey insurance policies? It makes fiddling sense. Given that a paltry 10 percent of the urban center'due south dogs have licenses, only the law-constant minority of pit-balderdash owners—not the louts who terrorize park-goers—are probable to comply with the new requirement, assuming it can get by the country objection to breed- specific laws. Moreover, those who wanted to comply would have a difficult fourth dimension finding an insurer. Though homeowners' policies mostly comprehend dogs, few insurance firms will issue one to someone with a dangerous animal. Much sounder are the metropolis's proposals to eliminate "provocation" as a defense for a dangerous dog's behavior and to pare abroad legal protections for dangerous dogs. Every bit Cornell's Katherine Houpt underscores, "If a dog has bitten someone, nosotros should consider information technology dangerous until proven otherwise. Who cares if a child has poked it with a pencil?"
The urban center'south best course would be to require the owners of all dogs weighing more than than twoscore pounds to go on them muzzled in public, equally Germany does with potentially aggressive breeds. A muzzle constabulary is non unduly harsh to the dogs. Every bit for its impact on owners: sure, it might diminish the thrill a tough gets as he parades his pit bull downwardly a crowded sidewalk and nervous pedestrians give him a broad berth. And that would be all to the good.
Every bit Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton discovered when they prosecuted nuisance crimes like public urination or public drinking and helped restore civic order, Gotham can exercise a lot of good simply past enforcing laws already on the books, as Parks Commissioner Stern is doing with the ternion police force. New York makes little try, for case, to ensure that its dogs are licensed, though the law requires it. The Canadian city of Calgary, which had a problem with dangerous dogs in the eighties, halved aggressive incidents through strict licensing enforcement: information technology allow officials continue computerized records of complaints against private dogs and impound them or crave them to wear a muzzle if they posed a clear threat to the public. Eighty percent of Calgary's 100,000 dogs now accept licenses; xc percent of New York's i million dogs don't. The city should step up licensing enforcement.
These measures would strike a prudent residual betwixt the enjoyments of pet owners and the city's responsibleness to protect its citizens and keep its public spaces from going to the dogs.
Photo: nndanko/iStock
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