Pit Bull Quotes

“If trained animal professionals with years of dog-handling experience aren’t good at visually identifying breeds, then what does that say about the rest of us?”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“That is yet another marvel and mystery of the dog: it is the only animal that will place our safety and survival above its own.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Just a generation ago if you went near a dog when he was eating and the dog growled,” she explained, “somebody would say, ‘Don’t go near the dog when he’s eating! What are you, crazy?’ Now the dog gets euthanized. Back then, dogs were allowed to say no. Dogs”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“To use a more accurate car metaphor, the Honda Civic, like the pit bull, is small in size, fairly generic in appearance, inexpensive, and easy to acquire. These four characteristics make it one of the best-selling cars of all time. For those exact same reasons, the Civic is also the leading car bought, sold, and modified for purposes of street drag racing, a highly dangerous and illegal practice that kills approximately one hundred Americans every year (three times as many as are killed by all types of dogs combined). Yet no legislator has ever proposed a ban on the Honda Civic in order to correct errant human behavior by a small number of people. If”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“If we want to own dogs, their teeth come along. It is up to us to learn how and when dogs use them and to keep our dogs out of situations where they feel they need to. Aside”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Dogs have evolved to understand us better over the millennia, but in modern pet culture we appear doomed to understand them less.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“In nearly every municipality where breed-specific legislation (BSL) has been adopted, it has failed to prevent serious dog bite injuries and hospitalizations. Veterinarians, animal behaviorists, and public health experts, including those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are virtually unanimous in their denunciation of BSL on the grounds that it is both cruel and ineffective.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“By World War I, pit bulls were so beloved as national symbols that we literally and figuratively wrapped them in the flag. We even called them “Yankee terriers.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“It’s not how the dog is “raised” that makes the largest difference in public safety but how the dog is maintained by its owner.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Donaldson believes that we owe it to our companions to respect their boundaries and to remember that some level of aggression is essential for any animal’s survival.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Once the breed label on my dog’s license had the potential to change the material circumstances of my life, including where I could and could not live, I began to notice how breed-focused modern American culture is. “When a cocker spaniel bites,” the journalist Tom Junod once wrote in Esquire, “it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Finally,” Jane recalled, “the public hated something worse than it hated pit bulls, and that was Michael Vick.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“By fending off police, pit bulls were portrayed as crack-dealing “accomplices” who abetted the rapid growth of the drug trade. To see just how closely the terms “crack cocaine” and “pit bull” were linked in the media, one need look no further than the Google Ngram Viewer, which charts word frequencies in published materials.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“The human parallels are important here, because the legend of the urban pit bull would become a literal companion piece to America’s failed war on drugs. When a dog scare collides with a drug scare—especially one as racialized as the crack “epidemic”—the effects are multiplicative.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“In 1920, a resident of Navarre, Ohio, reported that the town’s mayor had shot and killed his dachshund “for being German.” The dogs were “completely driven off the streets” in Cincinnati. Londoners feared walking their dachshunds in public, lest the animals be stoned to death. Reports of children beating, kicking, and “siccing” other dogs on dachshunds throughout England and the United States were common, and AKC registrations of dachshunds dropped to the low double digits, even as breeders scrambled to rename them “liberty hounds” and “liberty pups.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Whatever the reasoning, a neglected resident dog on a chain is more likely to become mentally frustrated from lack of exercise and fearful of strangers because it cannot flee to defend itself, while other people, dogs, and/or wildlife are free to approach, taunt, or harm it (in the Southwest, chained dogs are often called “coyote bait”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Sacks concurred. “Breed has been over focused on as the problem,” he said. “It’s a lot more complicated than that. Any bite involves a confluence of factors: a dog’s genetics, the victim’s behavior, the dog’s socialization, the dog’s medical history, the owner’s training. You can’t isolate one factor and say ‘That’s it!”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“The thirty-six other children killed by non-pit-bull-type dogs between 1983 and 1986 were also given minimal coverage in the press. The American media seemed to be interested in dog bite deaths and public safety only when pit bulls were responsible.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“This dramatic increase in the speed of information and the precipitous decline in critical thinking have been disastrous.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“The focus on “bait dogs” originally functioned as a well-intended means of generating sympathy for victims of cruelty, but it now perpetuates the stereotype that all pit bulls come from fighting backgrounds, when in reality only a tiny fraction of them do.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Of the thirty-three breeds represented in the sample, “pit bulls” (yet again classed as one “breed”) scored lower than average on all scales of human-directed aggression. On owner-directed aggression, they scored even lower than Labradors. Pit bulls scored slightly higher than average on aggression directed toward other dogs, but several other breeds, including dachshunds, equaled or surpassed them on that scale. The pit bulls were well within the range of normal.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Has she noticed any frightening pattern of deviance? “Oh, please,” she said, smiling. “Among trainers, pit bulls are considered cheap dates, actually. They have a reputation for being incredibly easy to train. They’ll pretty much do whatever you want. Some of us want a bit more of a challenge.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“park…The mental hurdle people seem to have is accepting that the dog decides what is spooky or threatening.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) warned in 2001, “Dog bite statistics are not really statistics, and they do not give an accurate picture of dogs that bite.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Shelters that have abandoned using breed labels for dogs from unknown backgrounds, including Orange County Animal Services in Florida and Fairfax County Animal Shelter in Virginia, have seen the number of dog adoptions at their facilities rise significantly.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“kennel cards and medical paperwork—did not match the animals’ DNA results 87.5 percent of the time. Additionally, the people who labeled the dogs could not agree with one another on which breeds were likely present in which dog. There was no interobserver reliability.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“The majority of mixed-breed dogs in America are not crosses of two purebred parents, he explained, but multigenerational mutts, or mutts mixed with other mutts mixed with other mutts. Because the number of genes that determine the dog’s shape is extremely small, and so many variations within those genes are possible, looking at a dog’s physical chassis and making a guess as to its probable heritage will inexorably lead to error.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Roughly 75 percent of the more than four hundred dog breeds we recognize today are whimsical confections whipped up in the late nineteenth century.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“Showing little regard for the animals’ historical working roles, health, temperament, or well-being, Victorian dog breeders raced to mold dramatic new shapes for their pets. Producing dogs in the same way one might produce widgets on an assembly line held tremendous appeal in an age of massive industrialization.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

“More than that, however, the rigid lens of breed seems to present the dog as a series of switches and levers waiting to be manipulated for our own use, rather than as a sentient creature with an emotional life and the ability to make choices.”
― Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon