Misleading White Paper Crafted to Ban Breed Restrictions in Housing
Depicted is a sampling of people in leadership roles, disproportionately white and female, at the humane groups that endorsed the white paper, along with authors of works cited in the paper.
Introduction
For decades, Pit Bull Advocates have been trying to shut down any opposition to unregulated pit bull ownership with cries of racism. Right now, there is a brand-new fake racism campaign aimed at state legislatures. Pit Bull Advocates (PBAs) want to bully them into banning insurance companies from using actuarial data to determine the need for housing insurance restrictions. PBA lobbyists were recently successful in passing state laws in Nevada and New York banning breed restrictions by homeowners insurance companies. This fake racism campaign is currently being waged in Arizona and Minnesota, as well as Canada.
Best Friends Animal Society and five other agencies have produced a white paper entitled, "Breed Discrimination in the Homeowners Insurance Industry". The paper is addressed to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) and contends current actuarial charts are not based on evidence. This is patently false. PBAs also contend the insurance industry discriminates against three groups of people 1.) The uninformed 2.) People of Color, and 3.) People of moderate or low means when they either deny home insurance coverage or charge higher premiums to cover pit bulls and other dangerous breeds.
The white paper is the foundation for a lobbying initiative to scare the insurance industry into abandoning actuarial data which clearly show that pit bulls inflict the most numerous serious attacks and the most costly attacks. Pit bull lobbyists allege that because pit bulls are disproportionately owned by Black people, insurance companies can effectively redline Black people by restricting coverage to pit bulls. PBAs assert that banning insurance companies from restricting pit bulls is protecting civil rights.
These fake racism claims are based on weak suppositions and 30-year-old stereotypes. One author cited in "Breed Discrimination in the Homeowners Insurance Industry" admits that there is no way to know if Black people are more likely to own pit bulls because no one is compiling those statistics. PBAs are relying on a 30-year-old, 90s era pit-bull-as-gangsta-accessory stereotype as proof of their assertion. Here is comedian Damien Lemon's take on that stereotype, "White People Have Taken Over the Pit Bull."
Damien Lemon talks about seeing white women with pit bulls and what a "rescue dog" is.
That's right, everyone but the pit bull lobby now identifies pit bulls as the darling of white female rescue angels. And young, wine-drinking, middle-class rescue angels even poke fun at themselves about this very fact. What's more, pit bulls, now associated with young middle-class white women, currently kill far more people per year than they did when pit bulls were viewed as the dog-of-choice of urban Black youths. Given all that, it is extremely odd that the pit bull lobby is hurling fake accusations of racism as a tactic to get legislation passed that bans insurance companies from implementing breed restrictions. It is even more odd that those tactics worked in Nevada and New York.
In their white paper, PBAs trot out many tired, already debunked arguments defending pit bulls. They deny the pit bull's dangerousness using old lobbyist techniques to mislead. These arguments sound silly to anyone familiar with the abundance of evidence that pit bulls are genuinely far more dangerous than all other kinds of dogs. They are just as silly as arguments made by the Big Tobacco lobby that cigarette smoking doesn't cause cancer. Today, everyone knows that smoking does cause cancer. It is easy to see how flimsy and self-serving the Big Tobacco lobby's arguments actually were. This editorial explains how the PBA lobby uses techniques that are identical to those used by the tobacco lobby for half a century to deny that smoking tobacco causes cancer despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
However, for the purpose of this white paper, those tired arguments are merely window dressing. PBA's real weapon in this current attack is the accusation of racist housing restrictions by the insurance industry. They are targeting insurance companies knowing that the industry did use racist housing policies in the past. They know insurance companies are still under scrutiny from civil rights organizations like the NAACP. The Insurance industry's history of genuine racism renders them especially vulnerable to fake allegations of racism. It does not really matter how silly the PBA's arguments are if they can scare state legislatures and the insurance industry into believing that regulating pit bulls is racist.
A Sea of White Faces
As strange as that claim may be, it becomes even more bizarre when you look at who is and who is not leveling these specific charges of racism against the homeowners insurance industry.
The white paper is authored or endorsed by The American Dog Breeders Association, The American Kennel Club, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement, Best Friends Animal Society, Humane Rescue Alliance, And the Humane Society of the United States. In addition, there has been a blitz of opinion pieces recently by members of these organizations as well as Animal Farm Foundation that push the same false and outdated narrative that regulating pit bulls is racist.
The faces of leadership roles in all of these organizations are starkly white and predominantly female. A sea of white faces in the upper and middle ranks of humane groups has been true for decades as well. The "very white" humane movement has mostly ignored its own lack of diversity since the 1990s, according to researchers. Blacks made up only 4% of employees at animal welfare organizations when surveyed in 2005 (less than half of the 32 organizations responded to the survey at all).1 Fast forward 15 years, when two surveys conducted by separate groups showed no progress since 2005 either. Today, Blacks account for less than 2% of workers and volunteers within the animal welfare industry.2
These organizations who decry racism in the home insurance industry have made little effort to recruit for diversity in the ranks of their own organizations for over 15 years. They didn't feel the need to have diverse voices informing their initiatives in the 1990s and they barely do today either.
Could these Pit Bull Advocates be white allies to people of color? Could they be amplifying the voices of Black activists and academics in their calls for racial justice while uniting anti-discrimination initiatives to pit bull initiatives? No. When you look at the authors cited by the PBAs to accuse the insurance companies of racist housing discrimination tactics, the sea of white only grows.
Less than 2% of people working in the animal welfare industry are Black and 84% are female.
The Authors:
- Erin Tarver, The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog: Race Criminality and the Pit Bull Culture, 55 Culture Theory and Critique 273, 281 (2013)
- Ann L. Schiavone, Real Bite: Legal Realism and Meaningful Rational Basis in Dog Law and Beyond, 25 WM. & MARY BILL OF RIGHTS J. 65, 111 – 12 (2016)
- Ann Linder, The Black Man's Dog: The Social Context of Breed Specific Legislation, 25 Animal Law 51 (2018)
- Colin Dayan, "Dead Dogs: Breed bans, euthanasia, and preemptive justice", Boston Review, 26-28 (2010)
- Karen Delise, The Pit Bull Placebo: The Media, Myths, and Politics of Canine Aggression, Anubis Publishing, (2007)
- Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon, Vintage Books (2016)
Together, these authors have created a false history of the pit bull in America to support the proposition that pit bulls were once beloved, "All American" dogs at the turn of the 20th century when white people owned them. These authors assert that pit bulls only became vilified when Black people began owning them in the 1970s. The false history in turn allows these authors to contend that Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) banning or regulating pit bulls only was implemented when pit bulls were associated with Black owners. Both of these assertions are false. Pit bulls have always been regarded as dangerous. Breed Specific Legislation was in fact called for and enacted at the turn of the 20th century.
The PBA's version of history is demonstrably false. News archive searches turn up opinion pieces calling for bulldogs to be banned in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the dogs were associated with white owners and white dogfighters. The first BSL was implemented in the late 19th century, with several cities adopting some form of BSL in the early 20th century, the period that was supposedly the heyday of the pit bull as "America's Dog."
Karen Delise created the first version of the pit bull's fake history as an "All American" pet in her 2007 self-published book, The Pit Bull Placebo. She maintains that pit bulls of the 19th and early 20th centuries were loyal farm dogs and universally beloved pets. She claims that by the late 19th century pit bulls were no longer used for dogfighting, which is ridiculously false. News archives of the era are full of features praising the ferocity of the bulldog as a fighting machine and condemning bulldog attacks on innocent people. Check out what turns up in news archives from Baltimore, just one city from that time period.
Delise blames the pit bull's negative image on modern media bias, politicians, and ignorance, but she does not blame racism in The Pit Bull Placebo. She likens the change in the 70s through the 90s to the Salem Witch Hunts and McCarthyism. She references race by saying that when people say pit bulls were different than other kinds of dogs, they were "removing their canineness". Without mentioning race directly, she compares recognition of the pit bulls' inbred dangerousness to race, but she does not assert that racism was a motivation for the supposed change in public regard for the pit bull.
Erin Tarver accepts Delise's false history of the pit bull's glory days and subsequent fall from grace without question in her 2013 paper, "The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog." And, she adds a new motivation for the changed attitude towards pit bulls: racism. According to Tarver, pit bulls were beloved pets in the early 20th century because white people owned them, but became reviled when pit bulls became associated with Black owners. Tarver suggests that the pit bull only became "pathologised and criminalized" once they became associated with Black people in the late 20th century, as if the original function of pit bulls -- dogfighting -- was not always considered criminal and pathological by the vast majority of people in the 19th an early 20th century.
Bronwen Dickey's 2016 book, Pit Bull: Battle over an American Icon, shares all kinds of evidence that pit bulls were beloved in the early 20th century to expand on Delise's false history of the pit bull. The problem is that when pit bulls became popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were just as controversial then as they are today. Dickey's "research" into the history of the pit bull consists of cherry picking tidbits that reveal that there was indeed a fad for pit bulls in the late 19th and the very early years of the 20th century. She presents the evidence of the pit bull fad without showing the inevitable and immediate consequences -- the news reports describing attacks on people and pets, the surge in casual dogfighting for entertainment, the opinion pieces about the bulldogs' dangerousness, and calls for breed bans.
Just one example of her one-sided "history" is her treatment of college fraternity mascots from the chapter "America's Dog." She shows that fighting pit bulls became very popular as college athletics team and fraternity mascots for a short period of time in the early 20th century. She doesn't mention that those mascots began to be banned from colleges because they attacked people and the fraternity boys used them for dogfighting.
Most importantly, she neglects to mention that the first BSL regarding pit bulldogs was enacted during the period that Dickey hails as the heyday of the universally beloved pit bull. If she bothered to include these facts, she would have to conclude that then as now, when pit bulls become more popular as pets, pit bull attacks skyrocket, draw a tremendous amount of controversy, and cities move to regulate them. It was then, as it is now about the dangerousness of the pit bull breed.
As background for her study, Ann Linder retells the same false history of the pit bull in, "The Black Man's Dog: The Social context of Breed Specific Legislation" to assert that pit bulls are viewed as great pets or dangerous depending on who owns them. In a study about "the social context of BSL", it is odd that Linder seems to be completely unaware that BSL regulating "bulldogs" (pit bulls) can be found as early as 1893 and throughout the early 1900s when they were "the white man's dog." She seems to mistakenly believe that BSL only began being enacted in the late 20th century. In addition, Linder fails to mention that many opinion pieces and editorials can be found advocating for bans and regulation of bulldogs in the late 19th century and early 20th century when pit bulls were associated with white people. That is a tremendous amount of "context" that was left out of her study of "context."
Linder's study looks at scant evidence from a single, small-scale examination that she administered to reach very weak conclusions. Linder claims that people believe pit bulls are more likely to be owned by Black people. She then claims this "might" mean that pit bull bans and home insurance policies excluding pit bulls could possibly also disproportionately restrict Black people from housing. She says this "possible" racial discrimination "might" be intentional, but she has no evidence of any of these suppositions.
Linder's study concludes merely by saying, "At this time, more research is needed…" and "…such findings would not be sufficient to challenge legislation legally…" Linder admits that "at the present time, actual ownership (of pit bulls by race) data is not available, (but) if true ownership resembles the perceived distribution measured here" they might be able to prove her claim. So, Linder cannot establish if pit bulls are more often owned by Black people. And, she established that the insurance companies and city councils have no way of knowing that either.
This false narrative about the once universally loved pet bulldog is the foundation for the claim that pit bulls have a bad reputation only because white people are racist. All that follows depends on this false narrative and premise. Once the full history of the pit bull is revealed, the actual reasons for breed restrictions in housing also emerge. Pit bulls are dangerous no matter who owns them and need to be regulated. There is nothing racist about wanting to remove the danger we see in these videos from our neighborhoods.
Activist groups such as the NAACP are currently seeking reform in the insurance industry to assure racial equity. However, it seems pretty strange that only white people are leading this particular charge of discrimination and racism against the housing insurance industry. That is, until you remember that these people are not anti-racism advocates. They are pit bull ownership advocates using the contrived claim of "possible" racism as a hammer to ban insurance companies from implementing breed restrictions. PBAs know that the insurance industry is vulnerable to this particular attack because the insurance industry participated in devastating racist policies like redlining in the past.
"Sea of White" Not Unnoticed
Essentially, "the sea of White," are PBAs and humane groups disproportionately represented by white women who are co-opting diversity, equity and inclusion messaging in order to advocate for dogs generally and pit bulls specifically. This phenomenon is not exclusive to PBAs and humane groups, though.
In 2018, Travis Wood was looking for a job in the field of video production, advertising, and design. While checking out the "Who We Are" pages of companies he was considering, he noticed the sea of white faces. And more than that. Those white people seem to be more willing to include dogs in their work space than to hire Black people. Since he works in video production, he used his skills to create a rather compelling illustration of what he found. Don't miss the pit bulls, bully breeds and pit bull-mixes in the video. Owned, of course, by white people.
Affurmative Action, a Short Film about workplace diversity told through "Meet The Team" pages.
Misusing Race Comparisons
Dr. Benedicte Boisseron, author of the book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, discussed the way white people tend to misuse race comparisons to promote animal rights with fellow academic Brigitte Fielder, associate professor of US & African American Studies. Afro-dog explores the relationship "between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the Black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that compulsively links and opposes Blackness and animality to measure the value of life." Boisseron notes that white people have associated Black people with animals from slavery times up to the present day.
From the discussion:
Fielder: Using histories and theories of racism in service to animals, many animal studies scholars and advocates have failed to show similar investments in the critical study of race, histories of racist oppression, and the nonwhite people who still experience racism in the present. In their use of racist oppression as a metaphor, they fail to address its historical complexity and continued resonance. They sometimes also repeat racist tropes of human-animal comparison.
Dr. Boisseron: One of the biggest challenges is misunderstandings. Those are very sensitive topics and people have different agendas. I've encountered a lot of misunderstandings, particularly when it comes to the question of comparison, when I try to explain that the comparison, the way it's been done in animal studies, can be demeaning or very problematic for Black studies...
Pit Bull Advocates, humane groups, misusing race comparisons to promote "Pit Bull Rights."
Rights activist Yasmin Nair also notices this unhappy relationship. Yasmin Nair reviewed Bronwen Dickey's book, Pit Bull: Battle over an American Icon. She agrees with Dickey's assertion that pit bulls have faced discrimination because they were associated with Black people. However, Nair, looking at the issue from the perspective of a right's activist, comes to a very different conclusion than Dickey did. In her view, pit bulls and apes, another animal likened to Black people, already have been redeemed while Black people still face discrimination.
"Harambe's death and the outrage that surrounded it also reflected a difference between the value placed on animal lives versus Black lives. Once, apes were seen as contiguous to Africans and other non-white people, hence the placement of the orangutan next to Ota Benga. But apes are now anthropomorphized, and many would rather have seen the child die than the gorilla.
Contrary to previous mythology, apes are no longer signifiers of blackness. They are treated with compassion and dignity, recognized for their intelligence and sophistication. Yet no such transformation has occurred in the treatment of race for humans. Black bodies are still shot at will and caged by the hundreds of thousands. Black people continue to be treated as animals even as animals have become human.
The redemption of the pit bull shows that animals have finally transcended race. It is only Black humans who must continue to bear its burden."
Concluding Thoughts
Yasmin Nair is favorable to pit bulls themselves, but she also sees what Black comedians commenting on their own communities have seen. Pit bulls were once associated with a certain type of Black person, but are now associated with middle class white women. Certainly, pit bulls have not and cannot be redeemed, and it has nothing to do with who owns them. The number of fatal attacks pit bulls commit each year has skyrocketed far beyond the rates of carnage they committed in the 80s and 90s when they were a fad accessory for rappers. Years and years of pit bull advocacy have polished the image of pit bulls without changing their propensity for attacking one bit.
Now people of all races and income brackets coo over pit bulls festooned with flower crowns and tutus. Worse, they ignore or laugh at the mention of a growing number of maiming and fatal pit bull attacks. No one is more enthusiastic about this than white middle class women. Here is another comedian, SNL's Michael Che, doing a bit about white women's known proclivity for putting cute clothes on fighting dogs. White rescue angels heard Che's bit and they owned it. Proudly. Here are 1,997 videos of white women and their rescue pit bulls that a white woman gathered in response to Che's comedy bit.
These pit bull advocacy groups are helmed by white women. And white women presuming to write about Black men's dogs are the only ones who haven't yet heard that the 90s are over. Rescue and advocacy groups have pushed pit bulls into neighborhoods of all demographics. And their advocacy has helped yearly average fatality rates skyrocket.
It is important to note that there are people of all races who do like pit bulls. There are theorists and researchers of color who do support pit bull ownership. It isn't that the sea of white women couldn't have consulted with Black voices. It's that they didn't. If these pit bull advocacy groups were genuinely concerned about issues of racism, discrimination and social justice, they would have made some small effort to recruit people from varied backgrounds years ago. And not just for appearances, but because they believed that listening to the voices of people of color is necessary for any intelligent campaign about racism and animal advocacy.
The coalition of Pit Bull Advocates that produced "Breed Discrimination in the Homeowners Insurance Industry" have invoked fake racism charges to ban insurance companies from implementing breed restrictions in housing. These charges are baseless, but they hit as hard as a hammer. Fake racism leveraged to protect unregulated pit bull ownership does injustice to people of color by hijacking important discussions on civil rights. And these charges do an injustice to all people by promoting unregulated dangerous dog ownership when regulation would protect us all.
40 years of U.S. fatal pit bull attacks in 5-year periods (1980 through 2019) by DogsBite.org.
2Animal Welfare Demographics, CARE/Harvard Project Implicit Results, Winter 2020 | The State of Animal Advocacy in the U.S. & Canada: Experiences & Turnover, Faunalytics report authored by Jo Anderson, PhD, July 2020 (faunalytics.org) and the Faunalytics related Encompass Essays.
32020 Census Illuminates Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Country, United States Census Bureau, August 12, 2021 (census.gov).
4AVMA Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook, 2017-2018 Edition, American Medical Veterinary Association (avma.org).
Related articles:
02/21/21: Barbara Kay: Academics Reframe Opposition to Dangerous Pit Bulls in Racist Terms
11/27/20: The Propaganda is All the Same: Pit Bull Lobby and Tobacco Institute by Lucy Muir
10/20/16: Back Story of the Montreal Pit Bull Ban; How the Pit Bull Lobby Operates...
Wow, another amazing job with all your research and great links. This whole movement is so utterly insulting to Black people. I find it disgusting these hypocrites and liars are doing this. They will stoop to any level to push their pit propaganda. Thanks, Colleen, for continuing to fight the good fight.
Terrific article clarifying a complicated, volatile subject. (The Damien Lemon video provides brilliant comic relief.) Thank you for examining a really important phenomenon — the exploitation of race and racism to camouflage indifference to the dangers posed by certain breeds of dogs.
It occasionally happens in San Francisco’s vicious and dangerous dog hearings that a pit bull owner accuses someone who fears their pit bull of being “racist.” This insidious comparison of the purely human injustice that is racism to the purposeful genetic manipulation of dogs to bring out different qualities is a shocking insult to every person who has ever suffered from racism or fought to combat it. “Breed = race” is as looney a formulation as any white supremacist could ever come up with.
So true and so well put. One of the authors in this research talks about certain breeds that were particularly vicious were used to hunt down slaves. I’m old enough to remember civil rights demonstrations where dogs and fire hoses were used against demonstrators. And today, police dogs set upon a Black person reminds of those horrible scenes. To try and make fighting breeds a “race” issue is abhorrent and on every level.
There’s a reason why pitbulls are bans and most city and countries. Because they’re dangerous .these white peoples and cesar milan are the reason why pitbull are still around killing babies and old peoples.The pitbull defenders repeat the same crap over and over.that’s not a real pitbull .pitbull are nanny dog.the media give pitbull a bad rap the ever so famous one its not the breed its how the owner raised them.
One aspect of this is the hypocrisy and double standards emanating from the power dog breed folks.
In most jurisdictions, the largest cat you can own without a zoo permit or some sort of special license is a Maine Coon, that averages out at ~18 lbs. Yet, owning a back yard full of 120 lb supermaulers is somehow perfectly acceptable?
How about farm animals? Goats, sheep, pigs, etc… are zoned out of most residential neighborhoods, but a “herd” of pit bulls is allowed? How is that reconcilable?
The fact is, these sorts of restrictions are put into place ALL THE TIME for a variety of common sense human health, human safety and human quality of life reasons. And, these common sense restrictions are put in place and stay in place withOUT all the frivolous, specious cries of bigotry, unconstitutionality, and so forth.
This raises the question: WHY are dog breed restrictions so overwhelmingly difficult to pass, enforce and maintain? Why can we regulate just about every other animal, and not dogs?
You make excellent points. This is why it’s insanity when we see it’s allowable in some states to own lions, tigers or chimps. A chimp ripped a woman’s face off several years and it was ALL over the news. Even Oprah featured the story with follow-up coverage. And yet, a pit/pit mix doing this is barely covered. Thank goodness CBS had the guts to air the dog-sitting tragedy. I’m sure they got a lot of push back from some viewers with “excuses” for what went wrong. These fighting breeds should be regulated. As you put it so clearly, It’s common sense.
And here in Florida they have banned the ownership of large pythons and iguanas. and I think a few other large lizards. Sadly way too late for them to control the now feral populations. But 20 years ago when my son was absolutely fascinated by reptiles and wanted them as pets as a responsible pet owner I did a lot of research with him before we purchased many reptiles. First the large snakes and large lizards while affordable to buy were going to grow and require huge amounts for food and housing and could be potentially harmful. Also I could already see some issues arising that were going to probably bring on government restrictions. So we got ones that were going to stay smaller, not cause issues,and not facing any sort of penalty or certification for them. Why pit owners think they should go out and get a dog that has so many communities banning them, such a deserved bad reputation just shows they don’t care. Insurance companies should not finance their choices.
This what happens when weaponized identity politics meets the dog welfare lobby.
Note that I didn’t call it animal welfare, because it’s really about dogs.
This whole breed=race makes my head, hurt.
If someone said “I only drink milk from Jersey cows because I’m for cow equality so I refuse to use richer Guernsey dairy products” we’d think they were stark raving bonkers. We’d find them especially bonkers if 99% of the farmers saying it, had butterscotch skin.
For context, I live in a BSL province.
Right now I live in a primarily Euro-Canadian neighbourhood. By that I mean that I’d wager perhaps 10-20% are PoC.
I used to live in a neighbourhood, beloved for its diversity (less so for the level of poverty) that was well above 50% PoC. It was the most densely populated area of the city.
In my old neighbourhood there was *one* friendly half-pitbull. Owned by a white woman. Why? Because police there harassed PoC continually and who needed the hassle of walking a dog that could get you stopped and harassed at any time? Who needed the headache of giving the cops an excuse to badger you at every turn about muzzle laws, how old the dog was, etc etc? Who wanted to get a barking or snarling dog shot in front of them during a police raid, warranted or unwarranted?
In this neighbourhood there are at least 5 I’ve seen and all but one, are owned by Euro-Canadians, mainly women. The police are rarely seen here unless someone calls them. Even though the law states pitbulls must be muzzled at all times–they aren’t.
This may be anecdotal but I suspect, as Colleen has proved, that there’s some serious underlying problems at the core, here. BTW, another well-researched article and I tip the hat to you, ma’am. I also wonder if there’s even more dirt under the carpet of who rescues are shovelling these pitbulls off, on.
There’s *real* racism at play, here. But it’s in the locations where PoC are forced to settle and the level of police brutality rather than anyone’s choice of dog. It’s in the uneven enforcement of BSL. It’s who is more likely to be approved to purchase friendly dogs from rescues and who is likely to have a pitbull palmed off on them…particularly known dangerous ones.
There’s a plethora of problems within the rescue organisations so at this point, I’m not really willing to concede that most of them are “experts” on anything other than fundraising.
I hate to tell you but the pitbull pushers at the “humane societies” don’t have a single qualm about pushing dangerous pitbulls off onto any unsuspecting soul they can. Once my kids were old enough to be around dogs I went to the humane society but I ended up leaving because they were trying hard to push a pitbull onto me. I didn’t even look at the dogs before they started, I simply said I wanted a smaller dog that was young. They started telling me what wonderful family dogs pitbulls were & I started laughing at them & repeated that I was looking for something like a cocker spaniel sized dog. They were just so intent on getting me to take a pitbull puppy eventually I just stopped arguing with them & told her I’d go find a nice puppy mill puppy! I didn’t of course but it would have certainly been safer than a pitbull!
As a cultural aside, perhaps it should be noted, in light of the commentary on white women with pit bulls, that there is a new documentary miniseries on Netflix called “Bad Vegan.” Its troubled “star” is, in fact, a white woman with a pit bull. Their relationship underscores mental health questions raised by the series. Suffice it to say, she will do nothing for the reputation of pit bull owners.
I had to give up on the series. As with much of the media, too much stupid crazy.
Vegan brains run on empty. Many of them have neuropsychiatric disease induced by nutrient deficiencies from years of this eating disorder lifestyle.
Christy, please, just don’t. I have been vegetarian for nearly my entire life and a vegan for over a decade. I’m a longtime member of this group– brought here by my concern for animal welfare (including human animals!) and distressed by what was going on in the world of dogs and sheltering.
Merritt Clifton, vegan, animal advocate and humane historian, has done tremendous work on behalf of pit bull attack victims through his Animals 24-7 website. He’s much smarter than the fighting breed enthusiasts, most of whom couldn’t care less about farm animals or any other species that isn’t a pit bull.
In our shelters there is almost nothing BUT pitbulls and pitbull mixes. Hmm, wonder why that would be the case?
Now just who do you think would be responsible for bringing soooo many of this breed into the area?
I can’t imagine?
Anyhow, I am a HUGE animal rights advocate (so guess I shouldn’t be on this site?) but I would LOVE to see this breed phased out.
Too bad the U.S. is so slow to do the right thing with so many issues!
Can’t all be as efficient, organized and intelligent as Germany, Denmark or New Zealand I guess?
Thank you voice of reason!!
Wow, this is totally not the topic of this blog post, and secondly, also unfounded. Please provide academic research papers supporting your statements or revise your opinion. You aren’t helping the cause of trying to protect the public from fighting dogs at all.
Me too. The many pictures of her tucked in bed under the covers with that ugly pit bull were repulsive. One episode… and I was over and out. Besides, it is a vapid premise and a poor excuse for a series.
Wanted her pit bull to live forever…
https://www.thedailybeast.com/netflixs-bad-vegan-exposes-sarma-meingailis-the-vegan-scammer-who-wanted-her-pit-bull-to-live-forever
Why exactly???…Why?…Why?…Why?
THAT goes far beyond the attachment disorder I suspect most PBA’s as having…
That is a very good question! Years ago there was another crazy scammer woman who had her pitbull cloned. Also white btw
Ha! I love how woke white people are always the ones screaming “Racism!” the loudest. Somehow they always figure out a way to get what they want by connecting the dots to racism.
Lets reinterpret the “target groups” that Pit Bull advocates are solicitous of. The un informed- AKA those who do not read the medical literature. People of low Economic means-AKA deserve “free” dogs regardless of risk involved. People of color-AKA, that in itself is so racist it defies comment.
As an African American person, this makes me furious! I hate when pit nutters use race (and everything else for that matter) to try to push their mauler agenda.
“mauler”
I like that- it’s how I refer to pitbulls from now on.
The problem doesn’t belong to the culture/race of those conned into taking pitbulls home…
… the problem belongs to the financial beneficiaries of promoting pitbulls as safe pets–endangering everyone.
The photographic evidence is pretty clear on who they are.
Good treatise that touches on a difficult subject.
I tend to avoid discussing race as much as possible due to people hiding their true feelings and intentions in this regard. I used to listen to cordless phone conversations back years ago while living in Los Angeles. And for better or worse I can’t shake the distrust I learned as a result. Things you wish you never knew.
So forgive me when I roll my eyes when ever the subject of race is brought up. I just would rather not.
Sorry, I’ve not yet read the whole post. Thanks so much for all the work you’ve put into this.
I live in Europe so things are a little different. I think the animal rehoming organisations/shelters have a lot to answer for and so do individual dog owners.
I recently saw a very old person who used a mobility aid (a walker) walking what looked like a smaller pit bull kind of dog. Dog was on one of those flexi leashes too.
In a recent online video I saw a younger woman also using a walker walk an XL bully dog.
This isn’t only dangerous for the public, but for the older/disabled person too. The moment any medium or larger or stronger dog decides to chase something (assuming the dog is on a leash), the dog will pull over the person and/or their walker. In someone already frail due to very old age or poor health, this can easily mean a hip fracture or other kind of fracture, limiting their mobility even more (plus the personal suffering, and the costs to the healthcare system). That should also be the end of them taking the dog out, but then what happens to the dog if there’s no one else in the household to walk the dog?
Who at a rehoming organisation sees a frail/older person and thinks “Yes, they need a strong gamey dog!”. What kind of person who owns a dog like that thinks “Yes, my frail and elderly mother should be walking my pit bull!”. People just have no common sense and they often make others pay for their mistakes.
I hope that law enforcement will crack down on this way harsher and start giving serious prison time to any owner of a dog that injures or kills a human.