Pit Bulls, Road Warriors: Life in Our Urban Jungle

It’s a jungle out there. There are coyotes in Bel-Air, mountain lions in Orange County and bobcats in Riverside. There are guard dogs trained to maul intruders who might come upon their owner’s crop of marijuana. And there are mad dogs in public parks and on the freeways, all shooting at each other, occasionally killing children playing. There are pit bulls and road warriors.

Crazed adolescents loaded down with ammunition and tanked up with drugs and alcohol cruise our freeways, spoiling for a fight. Some drive by barrio neighborhoods, shooting randomly at windows. A woman I knew in Riverside was killed that way. One day she was waiting on tables in a restaurant I frequented and the next day she was gone. Then there are simply those of us who have had so bad a day we carry weapons in our vehicles and on our persons, looking for relief from our all-so-insignificant frustrations: Walter Mitty with a gun.

There are menacing pet owners fond of steel-studded dog collars and survival knives, who turn their backyards into little citadels, waiting in the anger of their hearts for some intruder for their dogs to maul. Some eagerly anticipate an excuse to kill or maim, but unlike their adolescent counterparts, they do not care to go to jail for it, so they wait for a pretense. When they leave their homes some carry loaded shotguns in their vans or pickups and revolvers in their pants. If the excuse never comes for an incident to make their day, they shoot at traffic dawdlers or other such offenders, most often under the disinhibiting influence of alcohol.

People like these, looking to kill and get away with it, share this anger with their children and their pets and provoke hostility. We’ve all heard of tough guys who beat their dogs for misbehaving and go on to beat their wives. If they even bother to take their dog to obedience school, the training they seek no reputable trainer has to offer: to teach a dog to kill. The children of these angry souls and their pets as well have never had a chance in life for happiness or love, since they have been raised on hate instead by their parents and their masters.

Circumstances can make killers of us all, turning people bestial and beasts into murderers. The mounting weight of poverty can be enough to break a person’s self-control. Environmental factors play a role, too, from smoggy crawling on the freeways to insufficient training and education, designed to give us endurance in adversity. At the same time the patience of a dog with children is proverbial, while we humans most often operate on a shorter fuse. Every living thing has its breaking point. But a decision must be made to act. And the motivation must first be there to do it.

The motivation to breed a dog to earn its owner money by fighting in a pit is a purely human one. The animal such breeding can produce has no such motivation. It may be aggressive, strong-willed and slow to yield to authority, but in the end it does what it is taught to do by the humans who control it. It is not a feral beast, like a wild pig fending for its food. It is someone’s pet. And we do a disservice to these animals when we ascribe motives to them only humans have, such as the yearning for revenge or to take it out on baby.

Whatever their breeding history, pit bulls are currently the focus of considerable hostility. Some would ban them altogether from existence. But the same once was said of German shepherds and Doberman pinschers. Those who love these dogs as pets and those who train them know them to be loving creatures, too, loyal and fond of exercise. Those who teach pit bulls to obey their masters and heel on a leash also know that their rare jaw musculature is the physiological source of their tenaciousness, in grasping hold of something and never letting go. This may require the use of a breaking stick, to be inserted in the back of the pit bull’s mouth to pry the jaws apart, in training them to yield. Owners who are ignorant of such facts about these dogs and those who own temperamentally aggressive animals without bothering to train them properly should no more be allowed to own such pets than a six-year-old should be allowed to drive a car.

It is important to distinguish an aggressive animal from a vicious one, and the same goes for humans, too. A vicious dog is a dog you cannot read, who bites without reason and attacks without cause, as a handler I know describes it. These are all clear cases of pathological deviation, rare enough in the general population and detectable by doctors. But to say a certain subspecies is altogether vicious is no less absurd and racist than to say the same of human beings.

Except for the individual dog or human being suffering from some neurological disease, even an aggressive creature, once trained properly and early in its life, can live in peace. And thousands of such aggressive animals and persons are dearly loved by those who care for them and admire them for their strengths. So people fall in love with muscled athletes or Dobermans.

The trouble lies in certain human beings with grudges in their hearts, who want a household pet to put terror in the hearts of others. It’s a question of mixed motives, not one of mixed-up breeding. Wanting a dog for a pet and also for attacking others is as contradictory a sentiment as loving your neighbor and wielding a gun. Some such contradictions can be breached, by specialists who are trained to do so, such as policemen with their guns and guard dogs. But this isn’t true of most pet owners, or gun owners either, for that matter.

Aggressive dogs and guns can be instruments of destruction but only at the behest of those who would use them in this way. And unlike guns, even aggressive dogs have a lot of love to give to those who truly care for them. To destroy such animals is a pointless exercise unless the persons who would abuse them and misuse them are constrained from finding other ways for venting their frustrations. The same might not be true of handguns, since they serve only one purpose.

We will always have such people with us. We can, in principle, reduce their numbers with proper education and psychological consideration, though this has never yet been tried in sufficient measure to give education a real chance to do its work. But we simply cannot tolerate an increase in the number of psychopaths and stressed-out crazies--road warriors who terrorize our towns.

One immediate and practical step would be to license those who own aggressive animals and weapons, so that pit-bull owners, for example, would have to certify their training, just as we would train a driver in the rules of the road. The same can be said about gun controls. To let lunatics--or even ordinary vicious people--have guns is itself as crazy as giving a pit bull to a terrorist or a loaded shotgun to a child.

Of course, such licensing measures would not stop all first-offenders. But if an owner must spend his days in prison once his untrained dog maims another person, at least that individual will be taken out of circulation. And the same can be said of gang members with their weapons, who shoot at random and kill a waitress in a restaurant or a child in a park.