Three years ago, I received an email from a writer who wanted to interview me on what I knew about the history of bulldogs and bull and terrier types.
I have received several emails like these over the years. They usually go nowhere, but when we were able to talk on the phone, I was actually quite surprised.
The author had actually read my blog very carefully, and the questions showed that she had done quite a bit of research on the topic. When you write these sorts of blog posts, you often wonder if people are actually paying attention to what you write.
She obviously had done her homework. She asked me something about Cuban bloodhounds, a defunct breed of dog used to catch runaway slaves. I hadn’t written on Cuban bloodhounds for many years. She asked about the ancient alaunt dogs, whether pit bulls had essentially become an urban landrace, and how society came to understand this concept of breed.
The author who contacted was Bronwen Dickey. I didn’t know it at the time, but she is the daughter of the great Southern poet and novelist James Dickey. And as I came to find out, she is a very fine writer in her own right.
In April 2013, she was delving deeper into the research around pit bulls. She was writing a book on the story of the pit bull type dog in America. Pit bulls, as we all know, are the most controversial dog breed in America. Many, many claims are made about them, but whether these claims withstand objective scrutiny is quite another thing. There is a widespread belief that these dogs have locking jaws or that they suddenly turn on people without warning. There is also a belief that a pit bull is a super canine that can readily dispatch a feral hog on its own and then curl up with the kids as the “Nanny dog.”
Both advocates and detractors have created an image of this sort of dog. What Bronwen wished to figure out is which parts are true and which are parts of contrived to the point of being pure fantasy.
It turns out there was quite a bit.
Now, this book isn’t out yet, and it’s already being attacked.
Pit bulls are so contentious that I stopped writing about them quite a while ago. Of all the issues I’ve seen dog people invest emotional time and energy into fighting over, pit bulls are truly an outlier. Dog people fight over just about anything trivial, but when it comes to pit bulls, there is a whole other dimension: If a pit bull mauls someone, there will be a group that wants them all executed. If a pit bull mauls someone, there will be a group of people who want that dog’s life spared at all costs.
I’ve never seen anything quite like this in dogs. Indeed, the only other topic that riles people up more online is whether feminism destroyed video games or not.
In one week (May 10), Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon will be released. There are people whose minds will never be changed on both extremes of this debate, but for that great middle, who really wants to know what the pit bull is and what it truly means to this country, Bronwen Dickey has produced a nuanced analysis that is well worth reading.
And she’s a good writer.
When she had me review a few chapters of her drafts, I found them to be quite fascinating in deed.
But if you really want to know– and are brave enough to have your assumptions challenged– buy a copy. Only a few more days to wait.
A Retrieverman endorsement has a lot of weight in my view. Thanks for the review!
Thank you for the heads up. A large part of my younger life was spent with bull terriers, and living in a city. If you had a bull terrier in the 1960s/70s in the Bay Area, you attracted pit bull fanciers, by far the more common breed. Pit bull owners were always interested in bull terriers, the ‘other pit bull.’ Did they still have fighting powers? they wanted to know. Consequently I met a number of people, usually black or hispanic, who fought their dogs.
I also met people who hunted pit bull/bull terrier crosses on introduced wild boar in NoCal. I never fought my dog, or wanted to, but some of the people I met were very interesting and intelligent. Those I liked loved their dogs and kept good care of them, but they were still involved/interested in pit fighting on some degree (one was a gang leader, one raised fighting cocks in Florida and had a pit bull for protection, and one was a black retired postal worker who got me interested in bull terriers).
My first bull terrier’s sire was used to hunt both boar and mountain lions (with a pack of greyhounds) in Arizona. He had some teeth kicked out by a wild burro and his pathologist owner had them replaced with gold teeth – quite interesting on an all-black bull terrier.
Later, I got to know the man who had bred the line of bull terriers that my first dog, and consequent bull terriers, came from. Col. Wilbur Barnes was a retired ex-gunboat marine (China in the 1930s) and had been an aide to Roosevelt during WWII. He had hunted with bull terriers in both India and Venezuela, and then bred the top colored bull terrier in the U.S. in the 1950s, the great grandfather of my first BT. I showed my dog in large dog shows on both coasts (he won a number of classes) and he was the most noble, funny, athletic and intelligent dog in my long life. He was also the best family dog to my young daughters, and would have protected them with his life.
Since that time I have grown to dislike showing dogs (due to what it has done to so many breeds, including bull terriers), and the AKC for blindly allowing breeds to be ruined and not policing puppy mills. I ended up owning four bull terriers over a 20-year span, and my first was by far the best.
I stopped owning bull terriers because they are a huge responsibility. They can be the best family dog ever, but if another dog is aggressive toward their family in any way, they have the capability to kill that dog or do terrible damage, just like a pit bull. It does not matter if the dog is smaller or five times larger, many can still do damage like a pit bull in a pit. I have 14-year old Irish terrier now (my second), and he is a fine dog. He is a scrapper, when pushed, but he is a gentleman too, and cannot do the kind of damage a pit bull breed has the potential to do.
I realized that I am generalizing here, and that there are probably a lot of bull terriers and pit bulls out there that are considered to be absolute non-aggressive sweethearts. However, that is not what they were bred to be.
I am very much looking forward to reading this.
Thanks for the tip on this books arrival. Can’t wait to read.
I will have to check this out! Can’t wait to read it, thanks for the post!