How Pit Bulls smashed the myths and strengthened my belief in No Kill

I don’t own a pit bull.  My dogs of choice are independent, freaky, northern breeds and dogs with pointy ears and long muzzles.  Even to this day, and probably forever more, my own dogs are (for the most part) pointy eared and full of fur.  They shed fur that swirls on our living room floor in the wake of the ceiling fan like some sort of dog hair tornado.  This is despite my giving up on a standard upright and vacuuming the house with a shop vac.  I wouldn’t have it any other way and I mention this to point out that I can’t claim any special personal attachment to pit bulls.  When pit bulls are defended, they are usually defended by people who love them and live with them, often accompanied by adorable pictures of their sweet, smiling dogs, and are discounted by anti-pit bull folks as biased (by love??) or “those pit bull people”.

For many years I had heard and believed that there are just too many animals and not enough homes.  Don’t breed or buy while shelter animals die.  Insert cliche here.  I believed it and I felt good about believing in it because it seemed to make sense.

But when I started working with dogs in shelters, I started to rethink these often spouted cliches that I had so proudly clung to.  While they might have worked twenty years ago and they may still work in small pockets around the country, they didn’t work anymore for where I was.

The reason I wanted to go and work at a shelter that handled about 25-30,000 animals in a warehouse was because I knew I could make a difference.  I knew I could save lives.  I didn’t have all of the answers but I just knew I could save animals.  Working there was an incredible uphill battle but I quickly - very very quickly - came to the conclusion that there were only two animal population problems in that shelter - cats and pit bulls (including bully “types” and mixes who were often lumped and labelled as pit bulls).

What I realized, when we were up to our ears in cats and pit bulls, was that the problem in my city could be focused on with laser precision.  There was no need for cliches and there was no need to recite mantras and bludgeon everyone to death with faulty or flawed logic and statistics.  The problem was as clear as day and the problem wasn’t breeders or pet shop pets. 

To clarify - puppy mills are horrific and an abomination against the elevated companion status that we have given to our dogs but puppy mills and their pet store ‘products’ were not winding up at the shelter in great numbers and those who did - even the ones who had suffered from injury, disease or neglect - were saved and rehabilitated by the many great rescues we worked with and adopted.  Additionally there will always be nitwit pet owners and true crisis that cause dogs of all breeds to wind up in shelters but that was not the “problem”.

The overwhelming problem for dogs was caused by a small percentage of the human population that either didn’t have access to, understand the importance of or have the resources for veterinary care and sterilization for their dogs and those dogs were often (but not always!!!) pit bulls.  There was an even more egregious (minute, miniscule) fraction of the population that thought of the dogs as an accessory to their (legitimately) thug lifestyle. 

Why pit bulls?  If I gave you an answer, it would only be a wild guess (they are great and loyal dogs?) and that question is probably better answered by a social scientist.  And if anyone claims to know why humans gravitate en masse to one thing or another, please ask them which is the next beanie baby/cabbage patch fad so I can get in on the action early.

With all of the “good” (kennel attendant speak for easily adoptable) dogs going to rescue rapidly, the dogs in our adoption rows were pit bulls and pit bull mixes.  My choice was: continue to believe the hype, excusing away my inability to save particular dogs (that would have been easier and involved less tears) or buckle down and deal with reality.  I decided to throw out the cliches that didn’t make sense in the face of reality and work harder to get great dogs adopted. 

When the staff complained about the lack of “good” dogs I bristled. We are here to save animals, I reminded them.  Those dogs the rescues took didn’t need our help to get out of this building alive - these are the dogs who do.  If we can’t be here for them, the ones who truly need us, we don’t need to be here at all.  With that renewed mission we set about marketing and exposing these dogs to adopters even harder than before. 

A brown pit bull behind bars looks just like every other brown pit bull behind bars until you pull him out, put an “Adopt Me” vest on him and let him snuggle in your lap in at an off-site adoption location.  That isn’t a brown pit bull behind bars - that is a family pet.  Are people really against adopting your shelter’s pit bulls or are you, perhaps not doing all that you can do to allow their special and unique personalities to shine?  Does it sound like I’m blaming you and your shelter?  Don’t feel so singled out - that is the question I asked myself each and every day. 

It was hard work but fueled by the results of saving lives.  Our adoptions, the pit bull adoptions, the ones that really counted, went up and up that year for the first time.

Old habits die hard and new ones are even harder to explain to your animal advocate friends.  When I had lunch with a friend and heard tales of her harrassing neighbors about their intact labrador in the comfort of the fenced in suburban landscape, I couldn’t help but think silently - wow, when is the last time we had a litter of lab puppies turned into the shelter or any puppies other than the very few pit bull puppies we received here and there for that matter.  

And then I felt guilty for thinking it.  That’s what the cliches will do to you.