i do so love a nicely bandied word

Title quote from the 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels by George R. R. Martin. If you haven't read them, you really should.

For once in my life I'm actually ahead of schedule--statistics assignment is finished, two of the fiction pieces I'm writing are finished (one is an assessment piece, so I won't post it here in case it comes up as plagiarised, but I may post the other) and I have an actual cohesive plot for my NaNoWriMo novel. So here is the Pit Bull Rant, Part Two. Part One is here.

When we left off, I was mentioning that pit bulls are actually small dogs, and most so-called 'pit bulls' are mutts. The next part of this rant is that pit bulls, as most dogs, are not actually aggressive by nature. The reason pit bulls have a bad reputaton is actually the media. Now I know people are disinclined to believe that--after all, the media hype has to have some grain of truth somewhere--but bear with me...

Once upon a time, some idiot bought a spiffy new rottweiller puppy, because they were famed as a great guard dog. The idiot neglected or abused the dog, and the poor dog became vicious, and the dog attacked someone. Suddenly the papers were absolutely flooded with "ROTTWIEILLER MAULS CHILD", "ROTTWEILLER KILLS MAN", and so on, and so forth. While it's very likely that more than half these 'rottweiller' attacks were large mutts with black and brown colouring and possibly a docked tail, we'll ignore that for now. The important thing is, the scum of the earth--drug dealers, dog fighters, and the like--saw this, and ran out and bought rottweillers. Suddenly rottweillers were actively being trained to be vicious, and things got worse.

Breed-specific legislation was introduced to make it hard for rottweiller owners to do things like find houses or get property insurance, and the tide of vicious rottweillers slowed. Then someone's neglected German shepherd bit a person, and the cycle started all over again.

This has happened to rottweillers, German shepherds, dobermann pinschers, akita inus, chow chows, boxers, Rhodesian and Thai ridgebacks, Irish wolfhounds--in fact, just about every dog that's either large or known as a good guard dog has had this happen. And now it's the turn of the pit bull--who used to be known as a great dog to protect your kids while you were out.

Pit bulls are territorial, though--that I will never deny. If someone goes breaking into your property at night, they will happily chow down on the intruder. They will not, however, go seeking trouble--unless they're abused or totally neglected, which tragically is most often the case. Moreover, pit bulls need to be trained, as much as any other breed of dog and often more than any other breed of dog, because if you're buying a pittie from anyone other than a first class breeder who consistently shows and wins with their dogs, they've probably been bred for viciousness and/or had some mutts with totally unpredictable personalities put into their bloodline.

Recently I've also noticed an increasing number of people wanting to let pit bulls go quietly extinct, which I think would be a horrible shame, and also be like letting quarter horses go extinct because some of them have a genetic defect that causes them to keel over and die on occasion. Not all of them are bad--in fact, some are pretty damn good, and moreover will never spontaneously keel over before the age of 25. Same deal with pit bulls. Most of the good ones will go their whole life without so much as nipping a human, or another dog, for that matter.

I think that's all I wanted to cover. There may be a Part Three eventually, but I'm not sure--it depends if something else sets me off about pit bulls.