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Bum rap for pit bulls?

Limited statistics suggest danger, but advocate says they're victims of bias and bad owners

Pat Schneider  —  5/21/2008 5:50 am

When the dog rounded a corner and ran on to the South West Bike Path, where a west side woman was pedaling back from Paoli with a friend, she figured she was in trouble.

"You try not to have a bias, but when you're face to face with a pit bull, you don't have a good feeling," said the woman involved in the May 4 incident, who did not want her name used for this article.

The dog -- which its owner later identified to authorities as a 5-year-old neutered male pit bull mix named Rudy -- bit the bicyclist on the back of the knee as she pedaled past him.

The woman stopped, jumped off her bicycle and onto a retaining wall. "It looked like it was going to come up there. I don't know what I would have done if it did," she said, recalling she put her feet out to try to fend off the dog. "I was terrified."

Three boys in pursuit of the dog came around the corner just then, and after a brief chase, rounded up the animal, she said.

Just days after the bike path attack, authorities got a message that a 6-year-old girl was bitten by a pit bull in Brittingham Park. The bite scratched her, but did not puncture the skin.

Patrick Comfert, lead animal services worker for the Department of Public Health of Madison and Dane County, says the department does not regularly keep breed specific statistics on bites. But by his accounting, pit bulls are slightly -- but just slightly -- more likely to bite people than are other dog breeds.

Defenders of the breed say pit bulls have gotten a bum rap, not only by being maligned for bad behavior fostered by careless, cruel or wrong-headed owners, but also by being wrongly accused of violence done by other dog breeds.

"No one can tell the ancestry of a dog by looking at it, " said Peter Anderson, founder of Midwest Area Pit Stop, a pit bull rescue and foster care organization in Madison.

He says the news media is particularly bad about labeling a dog involved in a bite incident as a pit bull and perpetuating the breed's bad reputation.

Anderson points to commercially available breed testing kits based on the recent identification of the canine genome. The tests sometimes show that a dog isn't what it appears to be, he says.

For example, he cites Lola, one of 17 dogs currently in his care. She looks like what people typically think of as a pit bull, but tested not to have any of the blood lines typically called pit bull.

Three breeds, in fact, commonly are called pit bulls, Comfert says: American pit bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier and Staffordshire bull terrier. The breeds are related and similar in build -- large head, strong jaws, muscular body, short hair.

Aside from physical appearance, Anderson says a dog's temperament is also inherited, and those behavioral tendencies are not visible to the casual observer.

"The least likely dog to attack a person is a pit bull," Anderson said. That's because their history as dogs who fought other animals in arenas made it necessary that they accept being handled -- even mid-fight -- by their human handlers without turning on them.

Comfert agrees that the breed traditionally has been "personable and loving to families."

But the adoption of the breed by some as a symbol of ferocity has led to breeding for aggression, Comfert says.

"Gang members want a mean dog," he said. "They breed the meanest dog they can get their hands on with the meanest dog someone else has and you get less bite-inhibition."

Pit bulls are smart, strong and very athletic, Comfert says. That means that fences that might hold other dogs don't always work well with pit bulls.

Part of the reason they are at the top of the bite list now is the popularity of the breed, he says. It's happened before with other breeds -- cocker spaniels in the years following the Disney film "Lady and the Tramp," and Dalmatians following "101 Dalmatians."

"The breed's popularity skyrockets, everyone is breeding it and for years it's in the No. 1 spot for bites," Comfert said.

Still, there are some things about the pit bull that seem to make an attack more unnerving. "Victims say: 'It was so quiet. It just came, it didn't stop, didn't sniff. It just hit my dog,'" Comfert said.

The woman who was bitten on the bike path says she was surprised that no one among the many people along the path on a warm spring Sunday responded to her shouted pleas that someone call 911.

"If the police had gotten there and got the dog right away, I might not have needed the rabies shots," she said.

As it was, when she arrived home after the attack, her husband took her to an emergency care clinic, where doctors used five stitches to close the wound. And then it was on to the hospital for a series of rabies shots, the first of which was administered near the bite site -- in her case the tender, sinewy back of the knee. "I cannot tell you how painful that was," she said.

Shaken by her experience, the avid cyclist says she's not sure if she'll have the confidence to take to the paths and trails after the attack. "I won't know until I try to get on the bike."

Pat Schneider  —  5/21/2008 5:50 am