you forced my hand and made me do

Edit: Part Two is here.

Title from 'Things You See In A Graveyard', from the Repo! soundtrack. This is The Pit Bull Rant, Part One. The second part will be posted later. I'll link to it from this post when it's up. Just for the record, to see bigger or better quality picture, click on 'em.

Pit bulls--TRUE pit bulls, by which I mean the American Pit Bull Terrier, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and the American Staffordshire Terrier--are small dogs. Not one of them weighs over twenty kilos, which is in the vicinity of forty pounds if you don't use metric. They're all around forty or fifty centimetres high, so around sixteen inches. They are smaller than a labrador. So if a dog any bigger than that goes after you? It ain't a pit bull. It's either a mutt, or a different breed of dog you can't recognise.

Take this test. See if you can identify a real American pit bull. I guarantee you'll miss a fair few times, unless you're intimately familiar with the breed.

For example, this is not a pitbull. This is a mutt. Her name's Honey, and she's pictured here in full flight across a beach. She does have some staffordshire bull terrier in her, but she also has boxer, rhodesian ridgeback, and mastiff in her, and the most dominant breed is actually labrador. I've mentioned her before--I got her for ten bucks after seeing an ad for 'labrador' puppies, so called, in the Weekend Shopper. The mother was a friendly, yellowish dog with short hair; patently not a labrador, but a cute dog. While Honey does have some pitbull-like features, she's too big, clocking in at about sixty centimetres tall, and has the wrong body-shape. The pit bull breeds have deep chests like hers, but Honey's body tapers off after that in the manner of a retriever's, whereas true pit bulls have a consistent barrel-shape.

Anyone familiar with the pit bull breeds can tell you that this is also not a pit bull. This dog was accused of mauling an older man who was walking past it's house. The media immediately slapped the 'pit bull' lable on this particular beast. This is as much a pit bull as I am. It's a mutt. If anything, it looks like a shar pei or dogue de bordeau cross. Another breed I'd toss in as a possibility is the patterdale terrier. It's definitely not a pit bull.



For comparison; here we have a composite image of an American Pit Bull Terrier, an American Staffordshire Terrier, and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier--with acronyms, for your convinience. They're all winners in their breed classes at dog shows, and so should be the best representation of their breeds. (I'm not sure about the AST in the middle there, actually, but she came up on a reputable site and it could always just be a poor camera angle, so she'll do.) The picture quality is not great, but you can see what these dogs have in common--wedge-shaped heads, deep chests, thick bodies, and strong legs. You can also see that they're on the small side. The first APBT is at the larger end of the range for pit bulls, and he only comes from the judge's knee to the judge's thigh, bearing in mind that the judge is actually a foot or two behind him in that shot and not a tall man himself.