AS STEV E ZAW ISTOWSKI CALLED to order the first meeting of his hand-picked pit bull evaluation team, he felt like a character in a movie. Although the meeting was taking place in the nondescript conference room of a suburban Radisson, the space contained armed federal agents. Gag orders had been signed, and U.S. marshals waited outside to secret the team off on its mission.
Dr. Z hadn’t expected any of that. In fact, he’d been working hard to keep his expectations in check. The number he had in his head was 10 percent. He believed in animals. He’d studied their abilities and tested their limits. He’d seen them overcome incredible things. He thought, as the meeting began, if they could save 10 percent of the remaining dogs, it would be a noteworthy achievement.
They were down to forty-nine. In the original raid fifty-one pit bulls were seized. Since then, two had died while in custody, although little was known about how or why and likely never would be. But 10 percent of forty-nine was five dogs, and Dr. Z held out hope for that many.
He was not alone. On the plane ride to Richmond, Reynolds and Racer had set a goal of five. They thought they would be able to find five workable, adoptable dogs. Almost no one in the room dreamed of a number higher, and some wondered if there would be any. The words of HSUS president and CEO Wayne Pacelle kept ringing in their ears: “Our people have evaluated these dogs, and they’re some of the most viciously trained dogs in the country…”
The high-profile nature of the situation intensified the meaning. There could be no accidents, no oops moments. These dogs would be cheered, feared, written about, spied on, and watched for years. They would set precedents and establish boundaries for what was and was not possible, not only for pit bulls rescued from fight operations but for pit bulls as a breed.
Public outcry had helped get the Vick dogs this far, but now public perception would work against them. The simple truth was that most people were afraid of pit bulls. The breed had been portrayed as uncontrollable and bloodthirsty, liable to go off at any time, on anyone, for any reason-or for no reason at all.
The pit bull’s history suggested the opposite. The breed descended from a type of dog developed centuries ago to take on large game-deer, boar, bear-and evolved into working dogs on English farms and in butcher shops called bull dogs. (They were different from what we know today as the English bulldog.) They earned their keep at slaughter time by latching on to the nose of a hog or a cow or a loose bull and hanging on for all they were worth until the farmer could move in and make the kill. The dogs that were the best at this task had a strong neck and jaw, a wide mouth with a slight underbite, and a nose that allowed them to breathe while they were holding on. As farmers and butchers bred the more successful dogs, these traits became more prominent.
Before long, showmen set up exhibitions pitting the dogs against bulls or bears. Could these fierce little dogs take down bigger, stronger opponents simply by latching onto their snouts and refusing to let go? The public was charged admission and betting was encouraged. The stubborn bull dogs won as much as they lost, and the spectacle became quite popular. But bull baiting and bear baiting were banned in 1835.
For some, the show had to go on, so the dogs were pitted against one another, but they were not built for the task. They lacked the aggressive impulse to go after one another. So terrier blood was introduced. Small dogs bred to catch rats and other vermin, terriers are known for their speed, energy, and heightened inclination to chase and attack other animals.
The result was the Staffordshire bull terrier, a muscular and agile athlete dog that had an especially strong jaw and neck, an indefatigable will, and a strong chase instinct. They were apt fighters, but they were more than fighting dogs. They still worked the farm alongside the farmer, still guarded the house, still played with the kids in the yard.
As dogfighting grew in popularity, the dogs were further refined for the purpose. The best fighters-the most aggressive and skilled-were bred to one another to enhance those traits in future generations. But as much as the dog men wanted the animals to be aggressive toward one another, they wanted them to be amenable to people. Dogfighters stay in the ring during the fight and occasionally have to separate or handle the combatants, so the dogs had to be sensitive enough to people that even during the heat of battle they would not turn on the men in the ring. Any dog that did so was put down immediately, and if not, it certainly was not bred.
So even as they became better fighters, these dogs became friendlier and more responsive to people. There are few breeds in the world that thrive more on human attention. The desire to please, to get the pat on the head, is part of what drives them to persist in the pit.
It is also why they were always known as great family pets. In the 1800s the breed had a nickname in Great Britain: nanny dogs, because they were so great with children. Petey of The Little Rascals, a Staffordshire terrier, was said to have been chosen specifically because the producers wanted a dog that would be good around the kids. Buster Brown’s dog, Tige, was also a pit bull, as was World War I hero Stubby, who helped sniff out German spies and find wounded soldiers as part of the 102nd Infantry.
When Staffordshire terriers came to the United States, they were inevitably crossbred with local dogs, and eventually developed into a distinct breed that became known as the American pit bull terrier, a dog that was nearly identical but slightly less stocky than its British cousin. The Staffordshire bull terrier was originally another name for the pit bull, but it has now evolved into a closely related breed of its own.
In any of those iterations, this dog’s once-friendly reputation has been largely forgotten in the last thirty years. In the 1980s the number of pit bulls grew and as it did so did the number of pit bull incidents. Combined with their fighting past, the dogs quickly earned a bad reputation, and when a few savage maulings took place, they became outright pariahs. Suddenly, any pit bull incident became the equivalent of a shark attack, guaranteeing a flush of screaming headlines and creating an urban mythology.
Now, the nine members of the Z team would have to single out-from a pack of dogs raised in a fighting operation and locked up in kennels for four months-dogs that would disprove the public’s basic beliefs about the breed. Maybe the idea of saving four or five dogs was asking too much.
Before any of them even landed in Virginia, the evaluation team had used a series of conference calls to arrive at certain conclusions. For starters, pit bulls, and fighting dogs in particular, were always at risk of being stolen by other dogfighters. In the early days of the Vick dogs’ incarceration, deputies stood guard outside the various shelters each night. If the evaluation team was going to consider putting any of those dogs back into the general population, it had to account for the possibility of the dogs falling into the wrong hands. To reduce any temptation, the team decided that any dog not put down at the end of the process would have to be spayed or neutered, which would make them less appealing to fighters in two ways. First, there would be no chance to make money breeding them, and second, a fixed dog can be less likely to fight. They also agreed that each dog would have a microchip implanted between its shoulders, making it instantly and permanently identifiable.
As far as the actual evaluations, the team had hammered out the series of temperament tests they would perform on the dogs to determine which ones had the potential to become family pets. It was not always a comfortable discussion. The ASPCA team members took more of an academic-scientific approach that was based on years of study and supplemented by field work. They proposed a bank of ten tests.
First was a simple observation of the dog’s overall demeanor. As each dog was brought into the testing area, the team would note if it was calm, happy, nervous, sad, aggressive, or anything else. In the second step an evaluator would approach the dog in a neutral way and gauge its reaction. Then the tester would begin petting the dog, first gently and then in more heavy-handed way. If all that went well, they would try something more invasive. Maybe a light pinch between toes would get a reaction?
The tester would approach the dog with a playful and excited voice to see if the dog would comprehend the opportunity and respond accordingly. Whether or not it did, the tester would then break out a tug toy, a ring or a rope, and let the dog latch on to one end and engage in a playful tug of war. The key moments came at the beginning and end of the game. Would the dog play and, if it did, would it let go when the game was over?
Then the really tricky part of the evaluation came. First a dog would be given food, and while it ate, someone would approach. They’d pet its body, then its head, and eventually would touch the bowl to see if the dog protected its food in an aggressive way. This was such a common problem for any dog that testers usually used a rubber prosthetic hand to carry it out. Oddly, though, food protection was seldom an issue for fighting dogs. Still, the fake hand would be used.
Next, they’d give the dog something it would really love, a treat or a tasty chewable item, such as a pig’s ear or a piece of rawhide, and try to take that away, all the while observing the dog’s reaction. After that, it would be presented with a very lifelike stuffed dog to test if it was animal aggressive. Finally, the dog would be shown a doll that resembled a human child. Obviously, any sort of aggressive reaction would mean certain death for the dog.
Donna Reynolds and Tim Racer liked most of what the ASPCA members proposed but they had their own evaluation system, developed during their ten years working with the breed, especially a four-year period when they were paid to assess all the pit bulls that came through the city shelter in Berkeley, California. It was a hands-on system supplemented by research.
BAD RAP preferred to begin the evaluation at the side of the pen, where they observed the dog’s behavior as it was approached. Did it cower in the corner, approach the gate and sit, wag its tail? Did it jump up and down, did it growl and show teeth? They also liked the “blow test,” which involved lightly blowing in the dog’s face. For whatever reason, they’d found that most pit bulls loved this and took it as an invitation for face-to-face contact, but a more negative or neutral reaction could indicate a dog that was less people-friendly.
Reynolds and Racer also wanted to see each dog interact with not only a fake dog, but with other live dogs, one of each gender. Racer argued that testing with live dogs was more telling of how the Vick dogs would react in the real world. He also favored a “push test,” in which he would start out gently and playfully pushing a dog and build up to the point where he was giving it a good shove that sent it back a few feet to see how it would react. He felt it added a little more certainty about the dog’s demeanor.
In the end, the two approaches were not that far apart and a compromise was easily reached. They would use both live dogs and stuffed dogs in the evaluations. And outside the ASPCA tests, BAD RAP could do their own additional tests, including the blow test and the push test.
In the conference room they went over everything one last time and ran through the assessment sheets that they would use to score each dog. They split into two groups, but they would all go to the first evaluation together, so they could compare notes on their observations and make sure everyone was grading on a coordinated scale. Outside, they ducked into unmarked cars and U.S. marshals whisked them off into the afternoon heat. Dr. Z was hopeful that the good guys would win. After all, they only needed to rescue 10 percent of the victims to save the day.