The American Pit Bull Terrier and Human Aggression

 

Many people seem to think that this breed is a danger to humans. While this is completely untrue; you can’t really blame them. After all, international media has given the general public a quite distorted and misinformed image of what kind of dog the “pitbull” (APBT) was bred to be. The stories on the news and in the Sunday paper rage about child-eating monsters and dogs that will always bite the hand that feeds have caused a very negative stereotype to be pinned to this breed by rampant ignorance and misinformation. Thus giving the public a rather twisted view of the APBT temperament.

 

With all these common myths and rumors surrounding the breed, how is one supposed to decipher between fact and fiction? While it is true the APBT was bred to have aggressive tendencies as many ill-informed people will tell you, but never were these instincts aimed toward humans.

 

When the APBT was being created, the goal they were trying to reach was to create a dog that a living incarnation of gameness and bursting with the ability to do whatever job they were given to. Which, back then, meant matching.

 

The same method that was used to amplify dog aggression in this breed was also used to weed out human aggression. Through generations of selective breeding - sifting through a variety of dogs to find a pair with matching ideal qualities - resulting in offspring that exceed (or at least match) their parents in terms of quality – breeders were able to control the results of the dogs they produced.

 

In layman’s terms, they would choose dogs that were proven (through themselves and their ancestry) to have certain physical and temperamental qualities and combine them to produce dogs that had a combination of the qualities that they desired, so on and so forth. When breeding the APBT, the goal of most dog men was to obtain a set of specific traits; these traits were most commonly valued in a particular order: Gameness, Ability, and docility toward man, which created ease of handling. Many dogs will bite anything that comes near them when they are in fight mode. This was not accepted by dog men, as it would indeed complicate the sport to have dogs attacking handlers and referees during a match. Dogs that showed any indication of aggression toward humans were most often culled (put to sleep or otherwise removed from the genepool) without hesitation, as were dogs that failed to prove their gameness/ability in the pit. The only dogs that would be bred were dogs that could prove they were up to code. Over generations, the result was a breed of extremely game dogs with an immense desire to please humans, an amazing ability to fight, comical and loyal, with a history of solid temperament.

 

In conclusion, if you are looking for a guard dog, the APBT is definitely not the dog for you.

If you are looking for a family dog that will be loyal, energetic, and entertaining, you may want to look into them.

 

(Keep in mind, here at PBC we always try to be quite courteous and do our very best to educate those who need it about this great breed for one specific reason; we love them.)