The next time you are at a dog park, ogling the playful golden retrievers and labradoodles, think twice before you glare at the lowly misunderstood pit bull as if it were the pariah of the dog world. Before you pull your dog away in fear, think about the history of the pit bull, and the slew of misinformation that led to this noble breed to be thought of as vicious and violent. That’s what writer, Bronwen Dickey, did in her new book, “Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon.”
“The main thing is that the group is so large and diverse it is really hard to make any generalizations at this point. We are not talking about one discrete breed. Also, the media has been so obsessed with the issues of pit bulls that it is so much in our minds already; so many images of horrible events, rare though that they are, are very jarring to our minds,” said Dickey on Boston Public Radio on Tuesday
Dickey was inspired to write the book while in north Georgia on a reporting assignment in 2008. At the time she was still very afraid of the breed. That is until she interacted with a black pit bull at the subject’s house she was covering. Dickey was surprised by how friendly and smart the dog was. “I started wondering if she was just an outlier, or if there was more to all the things I had come to believe about these dogs than maybe I knew. There is a lot more hype than fact,” said Dickey.
Seven years later, Dickey’s desire to better understand pit bulls has resulted in a book and a national tour, where she is spreading the truth about the dogs. Dickey has not found the audience to be as receptive as she hoped. She has even been met by outspoken people, who refuse to accept that pit bulls can be gentle dogs.
The pit bull was originally bred as a fighting dog in the 1800’s. This history helped to solidify the perception of the dog even though they are no longer bred to fight. According to a 2009 study conducted by the Non-Profit, Animal People, 90 percent of the fatal dog bites were from rottweilers and pit bulls. Dickey says that these statistics are misleading and do not reveal any information about the larger context of the fatalities. “Those incidents are incredibly rare. 90 percent of dog bites don’t even break the skin. That is such a small number, that it is hard to extrapolate large trends out of them,” said Dickey.
Dickey was quick to say that the problems pit bulls face are not specific to the breed and that any dog breed would suffer if they were treated with the same disregard that pit bulls are. “I think we would all be safer and happier and live in more humane communities if we could just see dogs as dogs. These aren’t just pit bull problems, they are dog problems.”
