How Both Sides of the Pit Bull Debate Get It Wrong

The award-winning journalist and Oxford American editor Bronwen Dickey spent seven years Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon (out in paperback April 4), the most authoritative tome on one of our country’s most polarizing breeds. Though the impetus for the book was Dickey’s own stereotype-defying pit mix Nola, the author never fawns over the animals. Instead she takes a long, sober look at their history and warns against both deification and demonization. “You say the words ‘pit bull,’” she says, “and people lose their minds scrambling to one side or the other.”
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Pit Bull dispels myths perpetuated by both sides. No, their jaws don’t lock — but they were never “nanny dogs,” and you should never leave one alone with a child, because you should never leave any breed of dog alone with a child. Cropped ears don’t mean a pittie’s a fighter (the opposite, in fact), and scars don’t out it as a “bait dog” — a helpless, chained dog purportedly used to test or rile up a fighter. “There’s no mention of bait dogs in the entire history of fighting literature,” Dickey says. “It wouldn’t serve any purpose.”

If a “pit bull” shows up at a shelter with scars or broken bones, people often assume it was a fighting or bait dog. But it’s far more likely the dog was hit by a car, harmed in an accident, or otherwise abused by its owners. These myths — some of which mean to elicit sympathy for pits — only serve to further link the dogs to combat, which is misleading and counterproductive.

Dickey consulted dozens of animal experts and pored over mountains of data before emerging with a conclusion as mundane as it is profound: Pit bulls are just dogs. All too often, they serve as a proxy for our own prejudices.

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How Both Sides of the Pit Bull Debate Get It Wrong -- Science of Us