ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.

 

This site built and maintained by: GREANVILLE ASSOCIATESand CRESCENT COMMUNICATIONS •Rev. 12.1.05 Copyright ANIMAL PEOPLE, INC. 1992--2006

 

 

 

 

 
   

 
powered by FreeFind

ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: January/February 2007

Are pit bulls the problem, or their people? Study raises the question

 

CINCINNATI--The view that pit bull terriers get into trouble chiefly because the wrong people have them was reinforced on November 16, 2006 when a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence revealed that among a sampling of 355 people who keep pet dogs, all who keep pit bulls turned out to have had some sort of trouble with the law.

Thirty percent of the people in the sampling who had been cited at least once for failing to license a pit bull were found to have had at least five criminal convictions or traffic citations. Only 1% of the people who keep dogs with a low risk of being involved in an attack legally defined by Ohio municipal ordinances as "vicious" had five or more convictions or traffic citations, the researchers found.

"A 'vicious dog' means a dog that, without provocation, has killed or caused serious injury to any person, has killed another dog, or belongs to a breed that is commonly known as a pit bull dog," the study authors explained.

Because the definition of "vicious" presumed that any attack by a pit bull is high risk, regardless of the actual level of damage done, the terms of the study were stacked against finding a link between keeping pit bulls and having a history of lawbreaking, if their keepers were little different from keepers of other kinds of dogs. Ordinary citizens who keep pit bulls would have balanced and neutralized the influence of the lawbreakers.

Instead, explained lead study author Jaclyn Barnes of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, "Owners of vicious dogs who have been cited for failing to register a dog (or) failing to keep a dog confined on the premises ... are more than nine times more likely to have been convicted for a crime involving children, three times more likely to have been convicted of domestic violence ... and nearly eight times more likely to be charged with drug (crimes) than owners of low-risk licensed dogs."

Co-authors included Frank W. Putnam of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center; Barbara Boat of the Univ-ersity of Cincinnati, an investigator of animal/human relationships who has often spoken at humane conferences; and Harold Dates and Andrew Mahlman of the Cincinnati SPCA.
Whether violence involving pit bull terriers results chiefly from their own characteristics or the characteristics of people who are inclined to keep them, four parallel trends have perplexed the animal care and control community for more than a decade:

* Pit bull popularity has exploded. From 1900 until the late 1980s, pit bull terriers--combining mentions by all of their common names--made up less than 1% of the U.S. dog population, as indicated by newspaper classified advertising and appearances in news coverage. In recent years, however, pit bulls have proliferated fivefold, increasing in number approximately 10 times as fast as the dog population as a whole.

Electronic searches by ANIMAL PEOPLE of classified advertisements in periodicals serving demographically representative cross-sections of the U.S., spot-checking at different times of year, found that in 2006 pit bull terriers made up about 5% of the dogs offered for sale by breeders on any given day, but with much regional variation. In parts of the South and some big cities, pit bulls sometimes constituted 15% of the dogs offered for sale. In affluent suburbs they were occasionally fewer than 1%.

Rottweilers, by contrast, barely even registered in popularity before the 1980s, and are still barely more than 1% of all dogs.

* Pit bulls have been consistently about five times more likely than other dogs to arrive at animal shelters. When pit bulls were about 1% of the U.S. dog population, they made up about 5% of shelter admissions; at about 5% of the U.S. dog population, they make up more than 25%. The trend is similar for Rottweilers.

* Pit bull terriers are about 10 times more likely to kill or maim a person than other dogs. Excluding attacks by trained fighting dogs, guard dogs, and police dogs, dogs killed 35 people in the U.S. and Canada during 2006, the highest annual total since the editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE began logging dog attack data in 1982. Pit bull terriers killed 14 people, Rottweilers killed seven, and Presa Canarios, bred by crossing pit bulls with mastiffs, killed three.

At least 194 people were permanently disfigured by pet dogs in 2006. Pit bulls disfigured 59; Rottweilers disfigured 20; Presa Canarios disfigured four.

* Dogfighting, almost eradicated from most of the U.S. during the early 20th century, began an explosive resurgence in the 1990s, showing no sign yet of abating.

Reported law enforcement seizures of suspected fighting dogs reached an all-time recorded high of 916 in 2006, up from 837 in 2005.

Fewer than 100 alleged fighting dogs were seized in most years before 1998, when the number of reported seizures nearly quadrupled to 365, then more than doubled to 791 in 1999. Seizures peaked at 896 in 2000 and 869 in 2001, trended sharply downward after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 diverted law enforcement attention to other issues, and have since rebounded to about 10 times the pre-1998 norm.

Pit bulls vs. gamecocks

A theory popular among pit bull advocates is that the rise of dogfighting is only part of a general increase in animal fighting, associated with drug trafficking. But the growth of dogfighting into an economically significant clandestine industry only loosely parallels the trend in cockfighting, which remains legal in most counties of Louisiana and New Mexico, whereas dogfighting has been illegal throughout the U.S. for more than 80 years.

Seizures of alleged fighting dogs and gamecocks showed a parallel rise in the years before 9/11, as law enforcement agencies became increasingly aware of the frequent association of animal fighting with traffic in illegal drugs and firearms. Post-9/11, cock fighting arrests fell off along with dogfighting arrests.

Since then, however, gamecock seizures appear to have leveled off at about triple the mid-to-late 1990s norm.

Press coverage

Pit bull advocates commonly argue that pit bulls are considered "vicious" because incidents involving them receive disproportionately heavy news coverage--but key word searches of the 1,216 newspapers archived at NewsLibrary.com found only one year in the past 30, 1987, in which coverage of pit bulls appeared to be more intense than was warranted by the frequency of either life-threatening and fatal attacks, or dogfighting arrests and alleged fighting dog seizures.

Pit bulls were not even mentioned in any of the 1,216 newspapers indexed at NewsLibrary.com from 1976 through 1979--but then the numbers of mentions leaped from two in 1981 to 98 in 1995, 162 in 1986, and 470 in 1987, coinciding with a series of sensational attacks.

From 1988 through 1998, the frequency of mentions was consistent at about the 1986 level, but then nearly doubled in 1999, parallel to the number of fighting dog seizures; remained at the new peak for about five years; and more than doubled again from 2003 to 2005, as the number of fighting dog seizures again climbed.

A record 631 articles mentioning pit bulls were published in 2006, through December 30, up from 626 in 2005.
--Merritt Clifton