i will never stop yelling at people that the average people who own pitbulls are not the people posting on social media about their angel nanny dog. the nanny dog myth exists but like. we need to stop yelling at random people on the internet to take the fact that pitbull type dogs can be dangerous serious because most of the people i know who own pitbulls in my neighborhood (largely black and brown and lower income) know that already and do in fact get them for the scary dog factor/status symbol. and can we actually fucking like. talk about how these people can choose to breed dogs in a healthier way and train them if they were included in the conversations and not ostracized on the basis of dog people regarding them as backward ass backyard breeders and poor owners and just discounting them completely (excluding them on the basis of being poc and/or poor) like im so tired of it. the average rap video has like 5 pitbulls in it being big and scary bc they have a big and scary factor in these communities, who i find most commonly own pitbulls. i put kiwi in a down yesterday and a man asked me about training because he just didn’t know anything about it. like the big and scary factor of pitbulls is already mostly known in the communities that own them, they aren’t going anywhere, can we have discussions about them that center on how to encourage healthier more stable dogs then going over and over how they aren’t these mythical angel creatures because honestly im only seeing one subset of people referring to these dogs like that and they’re white and wealthy
I made this post a while ago, and it wasn’t really directed to shelter talk as much, but imo the way shelters operate with bully breeds is a kind of trickle down from the things I was discussing in this post. There’s also the fact being that a lot of rescue/shelter community issues that we’re seeing rn is due to obfuscating things like breed typical behavior, serious behavioral issues etc. And Pit Bulls are right smack in the middle of this because of their prevalence in shelters and in America in general.
Pit Bulls have had a really large media presence in America for a long long time, and this has swung from extremely favorable (in WW1 a Pit Bull was actually a troop mascot, and several were used in Hollywood movies) to Killer Pit bulls, (via the 70s 80s crime surge/ dog fighting falling out of favor, and Pit Bulls starting to be racialized at the same time) During the 80s, there were several media stories focusing on Pit Bull bites, and also focusing on the association of them with gangs, drugs traffickers (stereotyped as black and brown) and even respected professors stating that they were “loaded guns” and that “blacks generally tend to see animals as valuable only to the extent that they can be used or have a purpose” and in this statement there was the underlying association that Pit Bulls were a black/brown mans dog. For about 3 decades Pit Bulls were discussed in the media this way and BSL laws started to become more normalized. I could continue to go on about the history, but for the sake of time I wont. (most info of this is pulled from Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon, which is a great book) My point with this mini history lesson is that Pit Bulls have been moralized as a dog for a LONG time, and a lot of the way we talk about them today is directly because of that.
So we arrive at now, where there is a subset of people who discuss Pit Bulls and bully type breeds as being super serious dogs that you have to be extremely prepared for (a la malinois people) and another subset of people who are like “these are angel dogs! they would never hurt a fly” and both are still moralizing these dogs. The discourse circles around these two points constantly, and so do shelters. All of this really conveniently ignores really important points. 1) half of America owns pit bulls and several of these homes do it without any real problems. 2) Many Pit Bull types today really don’t have much guarantee in size or temperament excluding a trend towards DA/DR, because of the way they’re categorized by type. I’ve talked about how a lot bbm mutts are almost land racey, trending towards certain sizes and shapes and temperaments, but those trends present really differently dog to dog. And finally 3) They exclude the main communities who own these dogs, black and brown people who have owned these dogs pretty faithfully throughout time, and who are aware of the traits that Pit Bulls have. And I find it kind of funny that in an attempt to detract from the narrative of Pit Bulls that these shelters (owned by white ARAs often) and wealthier white people spread, Black Americans are STILL left out of the conversation, despite several examples in these communities of people who own Pit Bulls and understand the common traits, and just manage around it. The dog world has historically been very white (and wealthy), so I’m not surprised by it, but I do think it’s the piece of the puzzle that people are missing of why these dogs are so moralized
One of the things that I saw a lot when I lived just north of Philly were pit bulls which came out of puppy mills in Amish country - specifically Amish-owned puppy mills - and some of those breeders were good and reputable, and many… were… not.
A lot of those pibbles ended up in Philly, badly socialized and poorly trained - set up for failure, basically - and then cycled into shelters bc people’s circumstances changed or because they became too much to handle, where they’d be picked up by suburban rescues and then become impossible for anyone to adopt unless you descended from heaven on a cloud. We stopped even looking at a lot of the rescues bc even though we were a stable married couple working at banks who owned our home, had a fenced backyard, and had an older kid who was raised with dogs, since we didn’t have someone at home during the day, we were “not ideal.”
And then ofc the narrative here is how long-suffering the people running rescues are and how they save animals and only put them in the best homes and so on. And look, like, yes, they do save dogs and they do work hard and it is hard but like… these dogs could do really well with families in Philly who live in a rental rowhouse, as long as the family has support for getting the dog settled. We have had multiple pibble mixes in that environment, and they can really thrive if people have the support and training. It’s … not dissimilar to the narrative surrounding BIPOC kids being “saved” by white families, and sometimes feels like a kind of proxy for it, when you see that like… nobody is shutting down the (white) breeders who are poorly breeding pibbles en masse, and nobody is holding them to account, either. It’s all about “people getting a dog they can’t handle,” without regard to people getting a dog that … isn’t what they expected, because it’s not well-bred.
I love pit bulls. After we moved in with my wife, one of our friends referred to our house as the “pibble palace,” because after we combined our houses, we have 4 pit bull mixes. They can be really good dogs, and Rumba, @apocalycious’ dog, literally saved my life pretty recently.
But they’re big, heavy dogs, and they’re stubborn and can bond so strongly with Their Person that they can be disruptive when they’re separated from them. The moralizing around them - which I briefly fell victim to when we first got dogs going on 20y ago - is a pretty obvious reflection of anxiety around the people who often own them: poor people, brown and Black people. It’s not dissimilar to the old moralizing over Dobermans and Rottweilers, which were the fashionable “urban dogs” before pibbles.
I’m sure I’m repeating things others have said better, I’m just… I mean, they’re dogs, and the biggest mistakes that people make about dogs are generally the ways in which we anthropomorphosize them and forget that they are, in fact, dogs. It’s the same reason why little dogs can be vicious assholes if they’re not allowed to express boundaries and preferences while also being treated like they’ve got human thought processes and emotions. If a little dog isn’t listened to when it says “no,” by trying to leave or giving other signals, and people handle it too much in ways it doesn’t like, it’s left no option in saying “no” but to bite. Likewise, a lot of people who own little dogs make them fucking neurotic by treating them like small people rather than dogs.
Anyway. I like pit bulls, and the sooner the breed starts being treated like a breed of dog rather than either martyrs for people with a savior complex or a proxy for the fears that people have about poor/Black & brown people, the sooner a lot of dogs can be treated like dogs again.
Here’s a picture of Rumba for scrolling all the way down.
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