American Pit Bull Terrier Handbook. Joe Stahlkuppe
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Training
No other breed of dog needs the benefit of good training more than the APBT. For any breed with an aggressive heritage, ample training is an absolute must. If you don’t want to take the time to see that your pet is thoroughly trained, or if training is an aspect of dog ownership that doesn’t interest you, forget the APBT and find some other breed, or maybe just forego dog ownership altogether!
Traits
Loyalty and Fun
As a pet, the well-bred, well-socialized, and well-trained American Pit Bull Terrier is a great choice. Before “pit bull hysteria” started, stories about great APBTs were common. Thousands of APBTs lived long and happy lives. They are very loyal and there is absolutely no breed readier to give his life in protection of his family. They are also easy to groom. The breed is generally blessed with robust health. Seemingly built in to APBTs is an active love of life and, running counter to their public perception, an innate clownishness.
Aggressiveness
There are aspects of owning an APBT that require alert, aware, and careful owners. For example, some APBTs may show aggression especially to other aggressive dogs. Since, pound for pound, the APBT is the strongest dog in the world, one must be prepared to prevent impromptu scuffles and other problems before they occur.
Most other breeds and breed types briefly tussle, then one or the other will submit to the more dominant and thus the conflict ends. This matter of dominance/submission does not work the same way with the pit dog breeds.
Most APBTs that are family pets never get into a serious fight, and many go through their entire lives without ever showing overt aggression to a nonthreatening dog. This is largely due to the fact that these APBTs have owners who understand them. To an APBT, and to similar dog breeds and types, fighting can be like alcohol is to an alcoholic or drugs to a drug addict. Temperance is always recommended, and abstinence is desired; wise dog owners will strive to keep their APBTs out of situations where fighting is a possibility.
Good Health
The American Pit Bull Terrier is an unusually healthy breed. The rigors of his pit dog history have not given way to the many hereditary diseases or physical conditions that plague so many other purebred dog breeds. Good basic veterinary care is usually enough to give the APBT a chance at a long and full life. Preventive care and accident avoidance should be all that is needed to keep such a pet healthy.
The APBT can be just right for those humans capable of understanding him and of providing the right training, care, and environment for this breed. No dog of any breed or mixture of breeds should be obtained on impulse and certainly not an APBT. If you want a great dog, take great care to find and develop one for yourself and your family. You’ll be happy you did. Act impulsively and you will come to rue the day you ever thought about owning a dog.
The APBT Versus the “Pit Bull” Terror
A number of breeds have been forced to wear the unjust mantle of “canine Frankenstein.” Great Danes, now one of the mildest of dogs, once wore it. Malamutes, German Shepherd Dogs, Dobermans, and Akitas have worn it. Wolf-dog hybrids, Rottweilers, and Chow Chows still sometimes wear it. But no breed of dog in history has ever been loaded down with as much terribly evil baggage as has the APBT.
Fans of the breed look back to the good old days when their dogs got positive, or at least neutral, grades in the minds of the general public. In the past two decades, the instant-information society caught up with and chronicled every dog bite and attack occurring anywhere in the civilized world. Tabloid journalists—and some writers and broadcasters who simply didn’t dig deep enough—got the most exposure possible out of these incidents. Some sensationalized their accounts simply by affixing the “pit bull” tag. Bogus dog bite victims have found that their pleas for sympathy and possible legal claims are greatly strengthened if the incident in question involved the “dreaded pit bull.”
Human-aggressive “Pit Bulls”
Throughout this book, the name American Pit Bull Terrier or APBT refers only to actual dogs that are of that specific breed. “Pit” or “pit bull” (used here only in lower-case letters) is used to indicate dogs of less certain heritage. Anyone can choose to call his or her dog anything. This misnaming has greatly contributed to the bad rap legitimate APBTs have received. When any medium-sized, short-haired mongrel is misidentified as a “pit bull” or as a “part-pit bull,” that information may be the only thing that the listener or reader remembers.
Pit dogs could conceivably be of any breed. The irresponsible street pit fighters of today are constantly crossing, recrossing, and cross-crossing to gain some sort of perceived or imagined fighting advantage. Because the key ingredient in any pit dog must be gameness, this resorting to non-game breeds is foolish. Where, in years gone by, the APBTs of actual fighting strains were aggressive only toward other pit dogs, the mixed pit dogs of today are often aggressive toward dogs and humans. These dogs account for a vast proportion of the terrible dog bites and fatalities that so greatly contribute to the “pit bull terror” that seized the American psyche.
Certainly there have been horrible attacks by dogs said to be “pit bulls.” Some of these, especially involving children, have indeed been gruesome and tragic. Strangely though, even as the reputation of these dogs headed into the cesspool of public opinion, the popularity of the “pit bull” in some elements of the community grew at a phenomenal rate. Most of these new pit people wanted vicious dogs for a variety of unwise, unsavory, and illegal reasons. They began to indiscriminately breed their dogs. Viciousness and aggressiveness became prized commodities in a new type of pit dog. Soon, human-aggressive APBT-type dogs became fairly common. Human-aggressive APBTs and similar dogs had been extremely rare until the 1970s. Poorly bred, poorly socialized, and poorly trained animals suddenly grew into many thousands of these powerful and temperamentally unsound “pit bulls.” These poor imitations of the true APBT are responsible for the vast majority of the actual dog bites and attacks blamed on this breed.
The Media
Some print and broadcast journalists saw the name “pit bull” as a way to insure a wider audience for their news stories. Rather than zheck out the actual kind of dog involved in a dog bite, or the circumstances under which these bites occurred, some newspeople were content to take the first version of an incident that they heard. Unfortunately, a class of “killer dogs” developed in the public mentality from their poor reporting. Suddenly, as if in a self-fulfilling prophecy, every dog bite became a “pit bull” attack. Boxers, yellow Labs, and all short-haired, medium-sized mongrels were transformed into “pit bulls” or the equally vague, “pit bull-mixes.”
American Staffordshire Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Bull Terriers, Boxers, Bull Mastiffs, and other breeds suffered right along with the APBT. The public believed what they heard or read about this new canine scourge, a sort of Attila the Hound. A War of the Worlds mentality took over as headlines on the evening news read: “Two pit bulls terrorize small town” or “Policeman savaged by pit bull.” Combined with all the false “pit bull” stories or accusations were legitimate accounts that did actually involve some APBTs, Amstaffs, Staffy Bulls, and others. Unable and perhaps unwilling to put the “pit bull” genie back into the bottle, a media avalanche swept away the nearly 100 years of good reputation that the American