The current issue of the prestigious New Yorker Magazine (February 6) has a wonderful piece by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling books "Blink" and "The Tipping Point." The cover of the magazine bills the story as, "The problem with profiling. Is there any accurate way to determine who is going to behave badly?" But the article, on page 38, focuses largely on pitbulls and is headed, "What pit bulls can teach us about profiling." It is balanced and informative, pointing out real issues with the breed, but also making the point that the vast majority of pitbulls are not human aggressive. It argues that breed banning is hardly the most effective way to prevent dog attacks.
While some cities, most notably Denver, have brought in draconian total breed bans directing loving dogs to be taken out of loving homes and exterminated, other cities, for example many in California, are in the process of implementing measures that ban the breeding but not the keeping of specific breeds. As we kill five million animals for lack of homes I could not argue against any breeding bans. And as the adoptive mother of a beloved pitbull in a city where 80% of the dogs killed in the pounds are pitbulls or pit-mixes, I welcome a ban on reproducing that most abused breed while tens of thousands die each year for lack of homes. However I truly appreciate Gladwell's arguments against confiscating dogs that are no threat, regardless of breed.
The article opens with an account of a pitbull attack on a toddler. It then gives the bad news about the breed, with regard to other dogs: "A pit bull is willing to fight with little or no provocation. Pit bulls seem to have a high tolerance for pain, making it possible for them to fight to the point of exhaustion. Whereas guard dogs like German shepherds usually attempt to restrain those they perceive to be threats by biting and holding, pit bulls try to inflict the maximum amount of damage on an opponent. They bite, hold, shake, and tear. They don’t growl or assume an aggressive facial expression as warning. They just attack. 'They are often insensitive to behaviors that usually stop aggression,' one scientific review of the breed states. 'For example, dogs not bred for fighting usually display defeat in combat by rolling over and exposing a light underside. On several occasions, pit bulls have been reported to disembowel dogs offering this signal of submission.' In epidem
iological studies of dog bites, the pit bull is overrepresented among dogs known to have seriously injured or killed human beings, and, as a result, pit bulls have been banned or restricted in several Western European countries, China, and numerous cities and municipalities across North America. Pit bulls are dangerous."
But then, Gladwell goes on to write,
"Of course, not all pit bulls are dangerous. Most don’t bite anyone. Meanwhile, Dobermans and Great Danes and German shepherds and Rottweilers are frequent biters as well, and the dog that recently mauled a Frenchwoman so badly that she was given the world’s first face transplant was, of all things, a Labrador retriever. When we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a generalization."
Then Gladwell makes the point, well-known to those of us who love pitbulls, but little known to the general public, that pitbulls may be less likely than other dogs to bite humans (though their bites can do much damage):
"The supposedly troublesome characteristics of the pit-bull type—its gameness, its determination, its insensitivity to pain—are chiefly directed toward other dogs. Pit bulls were not bred to fight humans. On the contrary: a dog that went after spectators, or its handler, or the trainer, or any of the other people involved in making a dogfighting dog a good dogfighter was usually put down. (The rule in the pit-bull world was 'Man-eaters die.')"
He describes a temperament test done on 25,000 dogs: "Eighty-four per cent of the pit bulls that have been given the test have passed, which ranks pit bulls ahead of beagles, Airedales, bearded collies, and all but one variety of dachshund." “
Gladwell writes, "It can even be argued that the same traits that make the pit bull so aggressive toward other dogs are what make it so nice to humans."
He quotes writer Vicki Hearne: "There are a lot of pit bulls these days who are licensed therapy dogs. Their stability and resoluteness make them excellent for work with people who might not like a more bouncy, flibbertigibbet sort of dog. When pit bulls set out to provide comfort, they are as resolute as they are when they fight, but what they are resolute about is being gentle. And, because they are fearless, they can be gentle with anybody.”
Carl Herkstroeter, who did the temperament testing, says "The ones that the legislation is geared toward have aggressive tendencies that are either bred in by the breeder, trained in by the trainer, or reinforced in by the owner."
Gladwell goes on: "A mean pit bull is a dog that has been turned mean, by selective breeding, by being cross-bred with a bigger, human-aggressive breed like German shepherds or Rottweilers, or by being conditioned in such a way that it begins to express hostility to human beings. A pit bull is dangerous to people, then, not to the extent that it expresses its essential pit bullness but to the extent that it deviates from it. A pit-bull ban is a generalization about a generalization about a trait that is not, in fact, general. That’s a category problem."
And he writes:
"The kinds of dogs that kill people change over time, because the popularity of certain breeds changes over time. The one thing that doesn't change is the total number of the people killed by dogs. When we have more problems with pit bulls, it’s not necessarily a sign that pit bulls are more dangerous than other dogs. It could just be a sign that pit bulls have become more numerous.
Randall Lockwood of the ASPCA says the number of attacks by a certain breed of dog is "a reflection of what the dog of choice is among people who want to own an aggressive dog." And Lockwood says, "A fatal dog attack is not just a dog bite by a big or aggressive dog. It is usually a perfect storm of bad human-canine interactions—the wrong dog, the wrong background, the wrong history in the hands of the wrong person in the wrong environmental situation. I've been involved in many legal cases involving fatal dog attacks, and, certainly, it’s my impression that these are generally cases where everyone is to blame. You've got the unsupervised three-year-old child wandering in the neighborhood killed by a starved, abused dog owned by the dogfighting boyfriend of some woman who doesn't know where her child is. It’s not old Shep sleeping by the fire who suddenly goes bonkers. Usually there are all kinds of other warning signs.”
Gladwell discusses a study on dogs with a history of biting people that showed the breeds to be scattered. However he writes,
"But a number of other, more stable factors stand out. The biters were 6.2 times as likely to be male than female, and 2.6 times as likely to be intact than neutered. The Denver study also found that biters were 2.8 times as likely to be chained as unchained."
And, "The strongest connection of all, though, is between the trait of dog viciousness and certain kinds of dog owners. In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting. The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog. The junk-yard German shepherd—which looks as if it would rip your throat out—and the German-shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions."
Finally, he returns to the first attack he discussed in the article. We learn that the dogs had attacked before and that the man whose care they were under had a history of domestic assault. Gladwell writes:
"The court order in the wake of the first attack required that they be muzzled when they were outside the home and kept in an enclosed yard. But Café did not muzzle them, because, he said later, he couldn't afford muzzles, and apparently no one from the city ever came by to force him to comply. A few times, he talked about taking his dogs to obedience classes, but never did. The subject of neutering them also came up—particularly Agua, the male—but neutering cost a hundred dollars, which he evidently thought was too much money, and when the city temporarily confiscated his animals after the first attack it did not neuter them, either, because Ottawa does not have a policy of preëmptively neutering dogs that bite people."
Gladwell writes that on the day of the second attack, "The dogs had already passed through the animal bureaucracy of Ottawa, and the city could easily have prevented the second attack with the right kind of generalization—a generalization based not on breed but on the known and meaningful connection between dangerous dogs and negligent owners. But that would have required someone to track down Shridev Café, and check to see whether he had bought muzzles, and someone to send the dogs to be neutered after the first attack, and an animal-control law that insured that those whose dogs attack small children forfeit their right to have a dog. It would have required, that is, a more exacting set of generalizations to be more exactingly applied. It’s always easier just to ban the breed."
I have provided a few paragraphs of a lengthy article that also looks at racial and other profiling of people. It can be read in the current New Yorker or on line at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060206fa_fact
This intelligent and beautifully balanced discussion of pitbulls deserves some commendation. The New Yorker takes letters at themail@newyorker.com, which should be sent with the writer's name, address and daytime phone number.
For those interested in another helpful and balanced piece on the breed, I recommend the Bad Rap web page: http://www.badrap.org/rescue/owning.cfm
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)
----------------------------------------
You are subscribed to DawnWatch using the following address:
example@example.com
Date: Sat Feb 4 18:59:47 2006
