Why No One Should Ever Have A Pit Bull As A Pet

Check out Buzzfeed's sarcastic article, featuring beautiful pit bulls! Why would anyone not want to have these dogs as a pet?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/dont-pity-a-pitty#.tsJbdaema

Facts about Pits

Did You Know???

• It's true that the pit bull was originally bred to fight other dogs. However the dogs lived at home as a family pet in the late 1800s and lived in the house with the wives and children of the men who fought their dogs for sport, so they needed to be absolutely reliable around people. Dogs that showed human aggression were culled - that means they were euthanized and never bred from. These actions have evolved a unique dog personality where animal aggression has absolutely no connection with human aggression.

• Here's a list of the few celebrities who own pit bulls: Ray Romano, Don Cherry, Fred Astaire, President Roosevelt, Jack Dempsy, Thomas Edison, Madonna, Michael J Fox, Brad Pitt, Bernadette Peters, Sinbad, Alicia Silverstone, Linda Blair, Humphrey Bogart, Usher, Mel Brooks, Ann Bancroft, John Stuart, Jan Michael Vincent, Pink, Kelli Williams, Ken Howard (Father in Crossing Jordon - his Pit Shadow saved his life), Malcolm Jamal Warner, Stephan Jenkins, Rosie Perez, Ananda Lewis, Amy Jo Johnson, Mary Tyler Moore, Steve and Terrie Erwin (the Crocodile Hunter), Jack Johnson, Bill Berloni (Broadway show dog trainer who has said that the Pit is the breed of choice for training), Anthony Robbins, Molly Price, President Woodrow Wilson, Frankie Muniz, AJ Mclean, Barbara Eden, and even Helen Keller.

•  Pit Bulls are commonly used as therapy dogs. Whether they are visiting a senior care facility or helping someone recover from an emotional accident, Pit Bulls are making a mark as outstanding therapy dogs.

•  Pit Bulls score an 83.4% passing rate with the American Temperament Test Society. That's better than the popular Border Collie (a breed who scores 79.6%). 

MLB PlayerMark Buehrle’s dog will also not be welcome in Toronto

I'm proud that a baseball player owns a pit bull, maybe people will follow his lead?

What happen is that Mark Buehrle and his family heading back north to Canada after a  big trade with the Toronto Blue Jays. Everything's fine except the fact that Mark Buehrle has four dogs, which one of them is a  his American Staffordshire terrier (a pit bull breed). Pit bulls are banned in Ontario since 2005 so he has to get rid of his dog, or live in another part of the country with the closest being Quebec. That’s quite a long commute.

Fans of Buehrle know he won’t give up on the issue, since this isn't the first time he’s encountered trouble regarding his dog.


*Mark Buehrle's Staffordshire terrier is the grey dog.

Check out the story:

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/poor-hound-mark-buehrle-dog-not-welcome-toronto-150208507--mlb.html

and

http://www.ecorazzi.com/2012/11/14/mlb-player-mark-buehrles-pit-bull-banned-from-ontario/

The pit bull ban causes controversy

The Toronto star states that the Pit bull ban hasn't cut dog bites: http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/2010/04/28/pit_bull_ban_hasnt_cut_dog_bites.html

While Global News states the opposite:
http://www.globaltoronto.com/toronto+dog+bites+fell+after+pit+bull+ban/6442521422/story.html

In the Toronto star article it says that "There were 5,714 incidents in 2004, the year before the Liberal government rolled out breed-specific legislation to ban the sale and importation of pit bulls and in the last four years the dog bites slightly dropped to 5,350 to 5,500. This sounds reasonable, the bites fell, but not by a lot. A total of 486 bites were recorded in 2005. That number fell generally in the six years following, to 379 in 2010. This information was token during the ban. To show that the number of bites fallen after the ban you would have to take the data before 2005. These are the amount of dog bites from 2000-2010:

	Breed	Dogs, 2011	2000-10 bite reports	Dogs per 2000-10 bite report
1	PIT BULL	473	384	1.23
2	STAFFORDSHIRE	177	97	1.82
3	ST BERNARD RGH	19	10	1.90
4	FINNISH SPITZ	32	15	2.13
5	AM PIT BULL TER	43	20	2.15
6	ROTTWEILER	538	245	2.20
7	GERM SHEPHERD	1926	772	2.49
8	AMERICAN STAFF	105	40	2.63
9	CHOW CHOW	203	76	2.67
10	DALMATIAN	73	27	2.70
11	JINDO	36	13	2.77
12	COLLIE SMOOTH	69	24	2.88
13	AKITA	60	18	3.33
14	BELG MALINOIS	39	11	3.55
15	ALASK MALAMUTE	86	20	4.30
16	BULL TERRIER	91	21	4.33
17	BOUV FLANDRES	164	36	4.56
18	BULLMASTIFF	93	20	4.65
19	MASTIFF	77	16	4.81
20	PARSON RUSS TER	1911	396	4.83

(Breeds with fewer than 10 dogs excluded from the calculation) 

These graphs are taken from Global News. 

The truth of Pit Bull fighting

First of all I will explain the basics of Pit Bull fighting:

There are two types of dogfighting: street fighting and professional dogfighting. Street fighting is less professional and serves more as a symbol for the people who take part of gangs.. Up to 100,000 people in the US may be taking part in street fighting. Rival gangs force their dogs to fight against each other in bloody battles that take place in garages, alleys or abandoned buildings.

Professional dogfighting is a highly organized subculture, made up of secret groups. Professional dog fighters publish their own magazines that report the results of fights and chart lineages of successful fighting dogs. They travel widely to show off and fight their dogs. Some do it part-time, staying within the local community. Others make their living by breeding, training, fighting and gambling on the animals. This all seams acceptable, but the dogs live in very bad circumstances.

These dogs are not allowed to live normal lives. Instead, they spend their time chained in place, training or fighting. They often live in small cages and in filthy conditions. Handlers use heavy chains to hold dogs in place, frequently adding weights to them, all with the purpose of increasing a dog’s upper-body strength. Dogs are kept close to each other, but just out of reach in order to increase their antagonism.

Professional dogfighters make training regimens. Food and nutritional intake are meticulously measured. Some trainers give dogs steroids injections and supplements. To build endurance, dogs are forced to run on treadmills and to swim in pools, sometimes for hours. Trainers keep detailed records of their dogs’ exercise and feedings.

To increase aggressiveness, the animals are frequently beaten and antagonized. They may also be starved. As part of training, handlers will take cats or rabbits, often stolen, and use these animals as “bait.” These bait animals are tied up while the dog is restrained, or they’re put in a small enclosure with the dog. After training with the bait, the handler unchains the dog and allows him to kill it.

Handlers make their dogs tug on hanging objects, like tires, to increase jaw strength. Some handlers file their dogs’ teeth to be as sharp as possible so that maximum damage can be caused.

I personally think that Pit Bull fights should be illegal, not Pit bulls. In many states pit bull fighting is legal. The government is blaming the dogs; they are aggressive because we made them that way. It was our choice, now the dogs need to suffer. 

What makes BSL ineffective? (BSL= breed specific legislation)

• Dog attacks are usually the fault of an irresponsible owner, not a specific breed. Therefore,     banning an entire breed will solve nothing. The irresponsible owners will just most likely move on to another breed, and continue making bad choices regarding their dogs. BSL targets the breed, not the owner where the responsibility belongs.

• It’s very costly. It’s costly to the responsible owners, because they are forced to pay for insurance policies, ridiculously tall fences to be built, etc. BSL is also costly to the place enforcing it. There will be kenneling costs and court costs to deal with.

• It’s unfair to responsible owners. It restricts your right as a responsible dog owner to own certain breeds. If the law states that you can own the dog, but there are restrictions (muzzling, short leashes, high fences), you are still punished. When you take your dog in public, you are frowned upon and sometimes harassed by others for owning what they believe to be a “vicious” breed.

• Dogs can only be identified by appearance, and Pit Bulls are especially difficult for the average person to identify. There are far too many people that are not qualified to determine breeds of dogs and therefore Pit Bulls have become scapegoats. Any dog that bites or attacks, has a large head, or cropped ears, often gets called a Pit Bull. Many of these are actually not Pit Bulls at all, or are mixes with another dominant breed. Because of this, many dogs will be wrongly identified, and countless lives taken.

The Pit Bull's bad reputation and how it happened

Even with all the bans and the bad publicity, the Pit Bull Terrier is a very popular dog, with high popularity comes bad breeders. Bad breeders bred dogs that should have never been bred, are bred repeatedly regardless of bad temperaments, health problems, or genetic defects. The APBT has become popular for the wrong reasons. The media has spread to the world that Pit Bulls are tough "canine monsters" that some people just had to have. Now all of these dogs are living around the world. These dogs are dangerous, but some Pit Bulls are bred properly and are not aggressive. People now mistake any big dog for a Pit Bull. They are given blame for many attacks some of these were committed by poorly bred APBT. Some breeds that resemble the Pit Bull terrier: Boxers, American bulldogs, Rhodesian Ridge backs, Labrador retrievers, etc.

APBT= American Pit Bull Terriers