IT WAS THIRTY-SIX HOURS after Rebecca Huss had agreed to be special master of the Vick dogs, and she was covered in every variety of canine excretion she cared to consider: saliva, blood, vomit, urine, feces. She knew that legal procedures sometimes got messy, but she never thought the law would lead her to a series of dances with pit bulls in sometimes antiquated shelters across rural Virginia.
The day after the court approved her as special master she had boarded an early morning flight from Indianapolis to Richmond. If she was going to have to individually place each dog, she knew the first order of business was to meet each dog.
She also needed to reassess their condition. It had been six weeks since the ASPCA team had met with the dogs. That was six more weeks of kennel life-of barking, of cramped quarters, of limited or sometimes no exercise or outside time, of scant attention and interaction with people or other dogs. All that came on top of four previous months locked up under similar circumstances. Would the ASPCA evaluations even hold up at this point?
Huss had spent a lot of time with dogs, but she knew those types of assessments were beyond her capabilities, so Tim Racer had also scrambled out to Virginia. Over the next three days, the pair spent time with every dog, getting each out of its pen for an extended period. They gave each one a chance to run on a leash, and at shelters that had an enclosed area, they set them loose. They observed each dog as it interacted with another dog. They played with the dogs, they held them and petted them.
Huss had never spent much time with pit bulls, but now that she was immersed in their world she couldn’t understand why they had such a bad reputation. In truth, the pit bull was simply a dog, imbued with all the positive and negative attributes of its kind. Just like any dog, pit bulls could be sweet, friendly, and loving, and they could also be unruly, ill-mannered, and prone to doing incredibly stupid things by human standards.
But for a number of reasons, pit bulls were the latest breed to get sucked into a self-fulfilling cycle of fear, hype, substandard care, and rising population. In the nineteenth century, a different breed of dog was considered so vicious and insidious that it inspired almost universal fear and loathing. That breed was the bloodhound. [3]
Every time a bloodhound was involved in an incident, accounts of their aggression filled news columns. Why? For starters, the term bloodhound had come to include many different breeds, not just the classic floppy-eared specimen that accompanies Scotland Yard detectives in TV movies, but any dog prized for its tracking and guarding abilities. There were Irish bloodhounds, Siberian bloodhounds, Cuban bloodhounds, and numerous others.
Many of those dogs were used to track escaped prisoners and slaves, guard stores, and protect homes, so they were encouraged to be aggressive and territorial. In the course of doing that work they often ended up in situations where they were pitted against people, and as one would expect, a fair share of those run-ins ended violently.
The bloodhound got a reputation as a fearsome beast with a taste for blood. That reputation stoked anxiety in the general public, and at the same time caught the attention of people attracted to the idea of having a tough dog. The bloodhound population increased, and the new owners were not raising their dogs to be family pets. Many of them wouldn’t have known how to properly train the dogs even if they’d wanted to. As a result many bloodhounds were ill-equipped to deal with people and new situations. This led to even more violent run-ins and more fear.
What finally turned things around for the bloodhound? Was it a sudden change in social attitudes or an improved understanding of the forces that created the problem to start with? No, it was the emergence of the German shepherd. These dogs arrived in the United States around 1910 and quickly gained a reputation as great guard dogs with an aggressive streak. Again, ironically, this reputation caused a population spike, particularly among the wrong type of dog owner. By 1925 there were so many German shepherds around causing so many problems that the borough of Queens, New York, proposed a ban on them. Australia banned them in 1929.
By the 1950s, the German shepherd-redeemed in the public’s mind by Rin Tin Tin-gave way to the Doberman pinscher, which had earned its fearful rep as the Nazis’ dog of choice during World War II. SS troops with Dobermans were a staple of war photography and the tales of what these dogs inflicted on concentration camp victims were well known.
In 1964 there were 4,815 new Doberman registrations filed with the American Kennel Club. By 1979 there were 80,363 new Dobermans registered, making it the second most popular breed in the United States. Although there were a few notable, well-publicized attacks, to the Doberman’s credit, the population spike did not result in a proportionate spike in incidents.
Pit bulls weren’t so lucky. In the mid-1970s enterprising reporters began writing about the underground world of dogfighting, in hope of exposing and ending the practice. In the process they wrote about the tenacious and powerful dogs that were considered the ultimate fighters: pit bulls.
This had the effect of promoting pit bulls as next in the line of tough-guy dogs. By the early 1980s, the pit bull’s reputation made it popular among an emerging drug and hip hop culture. As with those before it, the breed’s popularity soared. Between 1983 and 1984 the United Kennel Club reported a 30 percent increase in registrations. And many pit bulls were not even being registered.
Between 1966 and 1975 there was one newspaper account of a fatality that resulted from a pit bull attack. In 1986, pit bulls appeared in 350 newspaper, magazine, and journal articles. Some of those reported legitimate pit bull attacks-the price of so many unsocialized, abused, and aggressively trained dogs popping up around the country-but many were the result of pit bull hysteria, in which almost any incident involving a dog was falsely reported as a pit bull attack. The breed, which had existed in some form for hundreds of years, didn’t suddenly lose control. The dogs simply fell into the hands of many more people who had no interest in control.
By 2000, pit bull fear and hype had reached such proportions that the breed was banned in more than two hundred cities and counties around the United States. Lost in all the legislation was the fact that for decades the pit bull had been considered one of the most loyal, loving, and people-friendly dogs on the planet.
Huss and Racer could not undo that tortured history, but they could impact the future of at least forty-eight pit bulls and hope to set an example that would help turn the tide for the rest. That’s why they spent two and a half days communing with the dogs, reviewing previous evaluations, and interviewing shelter attendants. But the most radical thing they did occurred at lunch on the final day. At a small pizza place Racer pulled out a piece of paper that listed each dog by its shelter I.D. number, color, and gender. Then he and Huss went down the list and gave each dog a name.
Suddenly these were no longer the Bad Newz dogs or those pit bulls from Vick’s place. They were Oscar and Rose, and Ernie and Charlie and Ray and Curly and forty-two others. They were no longer a story or a group or a commodity, they were forty-eight individual dogs in the same situation.
Despite how far they’d come, their destiny was not yet certain-any proposal still had to be approved by the court. But no one names a thing that doesn’t have hope. No one names a thing that doesn’t have a future. No one names a lost dog.
The Vick dogs had been found. Could they be saved?
<a l:href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> Much of the history and all the stats in this section derive from The Pit Bull Placebo, in which Karen Delise, founder of the National Canine Research Council, reviewed 150 years of newspaper archives and studied every account of a fatal or near-fatal dog attack.