Dog tales

The Lost Dogs of Michael Vick
and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption
by Jim Gorant

Apparently pit bulls have a bad rep.  Of some 49-odd animals rescued from the dog fighting operation of NFL football player Michael Vick, twenty-two were recommended for adoption.  Eighteen went into sanctuary with a good chance of being adoptable, someday; seven others went into sanctuary little chance of being adoptable.  Only two were put to sleep--one for ill health and one for aggression.

I thought pit bulls were hopelessly aggressive and too dangerous to ever be kept as pets.  The national statistics show pit bulls and rottweilers as the two breeds responsible for over half of all reported attacks on humans.  Case-by-case analysis of fatal dog attacks showed that most of the human subjects were very old, mentally impaired, or very young.  An analysis of one group of attack reports, in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, identified a pattern of contributing factors, such as: (a) lack of supervision of vulnerable humans (b)  dogs not socialized for human interactions (c) owner history of abuse or neglect (d) failure to neuter adult male dogs, and a couple morewhich overlapped the four listed above.  They found that four or more of these factors were co-present in 80% of the incidents.

But assuming that human beings are too damn stupid to change their behavior--

Sounds like  Jurrassic Park, doesn't it?  let's selectively breed a meaner dinosaur, teach it to hate humans, and trust the general population to stay out of its cage.

--still, it is probable that pit bulls have issues.  Some pit bulls.    The news media blow it all out of proportion, as usual.  "Pit bull mauls child" is big news, but the dog's state of health and lack of proper training is not. Before Pit bulls had the bad rep, there were German Shepherds.  And before German Shepherds, Doberman pinschers.  And bulldogs.  Can anyone convince me that a bulldog is too vicious to be a household pet?  Too dumb, maybe!

As to the dogs in this book, if there were a gene for "vicious behavior", these dogs didn't have it.  They weren't even all that good fighters.

The book is all too clearly written by a dog lover, and the first few chapters are way overdramatized.  Skim through that part, and get quickly to where the animals are taken from their kennels and spread out over temporary shelters.  And there a lot of the damage was done--at its best, an animal shelter is a stressful place to be, and these dogs suffered for it.  But more than half of the book contains the dog stories.  The humans helped, but the dogs did the hard work.  Dogs are amazing!