Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Are pit bull terriers genetically uniform and predictably aggressive,
enough to warrant special restrictions? No, say leading dog experts in the
US, where the pit bull controversy has raged since the mid-1980s.

Randall Lockwood and Kate Rindy have studied the circumstances surrounding
all the fatal pit bull attacks in the US. Their findings suggest that ‘some
pit bulls present special problems’, say Lockwood and Rindy, who work in
the Higher Education Programs of the Humane Society of the United States,
in Washington DC. But they say it is impossible to make predictions about
the behaviour of an individual animal. ‘We must recognise the variability
in the animals that we call pit bulls and in their owners.’

A special workshop on the pit bull terrier controversy held at Tufts
School of Veterinary Medicine in Boston in 1987 concluded that ‘breed-specific
ordinances are not the answer’. Instead, the workshop participants argued
that town, county and state authorities should ‘pass and enforce dangerous
dog measures’.

No one disputes that a long history of breeding for fighting has given
pit bulls a genetic predisposition for abnormal aggressiveness. Years of
selection for ‘gameness’ means that dogs can fight with no provocation,
says Lockwood. ‘Their behaviour is totally abnormal in an evolutionary or
ecological sense and is strictly the result of human intervention.’

Gameness also seems to include a genetically based insensitivity to
pain; the dogs will battle on despite severe injuries, and are abnormally
sensitive to anaesthetics – suggesting, perhaps, a deranged brain endorphin
system.

The nature of their attack is strange too: ‘Unlike other dogs, they
do not communicate intentions but attack without warning. The dogs fight
in silence; it’s quite uncanny,’ says Lockwood.

Nor do the animals respond to cut-off signals such as the ‘belly-up’
posture, a recognised sign of submission among dogs. These fighter dogs
simply disembowel the other dog, he says.

Breed standards for the dogs in the US make little or no reference to
the temperament of the animals. But some individual breeders have since
selected dogs with gentler temperaments. This means, says Lockwood, that
‘the extent to which breeding has altered the original temperaments of fighting
breeds is often difficult to predict in a given animal’.

The difficulty of prediction is compounded by the common practice of
crossing American Staffordshire and American pit bull terriers with other
breeds, particularly German shepherds, Rottweilers and the Rhodesian ridgeback.

These crosses, combining the fighting ability of the terriers with the
guard dogs’ aggressiveness to people, can be even more dangerous than the
purebred pit bulls, which in the 19th century were bred to show little aggression
to people.

But aggression is not simply a matter of breeding. ‘Most troublesome
are owners specifically seeking a ‘mean’ dog. In their hands, any dog is
likely to become a menace, a pit bull particularly so,’ says Lockwood. In
a survey of 20 deaths caused by pit bulls, Lockwood found that half of the
owners were men aged between 20 and 25, and more than half were either involved
in dog fighting or had criminal records.

Chaining dogs also seems to promote aggression, and is certainly no
safeguard against attack. More than half of the pit bulls who killed people
in the US were chained at the time.