This was a good eye-roll-y headline to start off my day:
“PetSmart shopper gets bit by pit bull in store”
The story’s not much deeper than this – other than these two salient points:
1.) The Detroit Pet Smart in question didn’t help out or take responsibility
2.) Neither did the dog-owning dude who left right after his pet bit the other shopper.
(This is what the dude looks like)
While the first point’s annoying, I’m not terribly surprised. Not only because my experience with PetSmart has been less than stellar with egregious employee encounters, but also because – well – this happened in Detroit. Lotta dispossessed and impoverished people there whose first priority’s survival and last priority’s putting on a cardigan and singing tunes about compassion to your neighbor. Even when your canine’s the cause of their pain. The second point was of more interest to me. Especially after entertaining some of the other readers’ musings on the matter.
Like the one who posed a question that went something like:
“If pits aren’t aggressive, whyd’ya you always hear about pits biting people?”
And you know what? That’s actually an excellent question – if you don’t take it rhetorically. Let’s think about it instead. Why do you hear about people getting attacked by pits all the time? The truth is: you don’t. You don’t just hear about it bully breeds doing the biting. What happens is that pitties are our new blame-dog now because they’re the most popular. The trendy other-era guard dogs were Dobermans (70s), then the German Shepherd (80s), the Rottweiler (90s) and then pitts after that. And each era, the dog breed was blamed. I think there’s a meme somewhere to illustrate this…
(Yep. That’s the one.)
Pits are just the sensationalized dog breed now that we attribute to being so violent. So, now, when you hear a story about a dog bite, you’ll see one of two headlines: “Dog bites stranger” or “Pit Bull bites stranger”. People have a lotta opinions on this, so that means it’ll get more views if you use it in the title: “pit” gits hits. However, when you think of it, it’s kinda the canine version of, “Person robs a store” versus “Brown person robs a store.”
My concession (I’m always willing to play devil’s advocate) is that, yeah, maybe they have some inborn aggressive tendencies genetically present and accessible. But so do people. And just like good parenting – those unfavorable proclivities are either cultivated through abuse and neglect (which, yes, some do because they think it’ll make them “better guard dogs”) or they can be extinguished or at least managed through good pet-parenting – lots of love and socializing your pup around dog parks and people until he’s not reacting violently outta fear.
And which kind was the guy in this story? Well, we don’t have a lotta info on the assailant canine’s owner because he ran out. So we can’t say for sure that he’s a neglectful owner. But we can evaluate forensic evidence. Like the fact that this guy said, “I don’t know how that happened” when the bitee said, “Your dog bit me!” Then, he hightailed outta the store without the slightest regard for the guy who’d just been hurt badly at his expense. Now, if someone’s that neglectful about taking responsibility over his pet’s behavior, how responsible do you think he is with the pet itself?
How neglectful?
The yes-and to all’a this is that if the bit-by-a-pit stats seem significantly high, it could also be that this breed – as mentioned – is just more popular now. The rule of probability would dictate here that when you have more of anything – say, a certain animal breed – your chances of any range of behaviors increases in that population too. I’ve met some angry ass shih-tzus in my day. Most of them aren’t nasty. But you know what? When I think of my friends who own dogs, their numbers pale in comparison to the pitties as pets. If I had to guess, I’d say one in – at the most – five of my friends and the people I’ve met have, have had, or plan to adopt a pit bull. That’s a lot isn’t it? What I’d like to see is a graph comparing how many pit-bites happen versus how many pit-pets total there are in the country.
Then maybe we can consider whether the implied breed-ism in headlines like these is warranted.