Lucky is a small, brown brindled pit bull who’s spent the last two years at Orphans of the Storm, an animal shelter in Deerfield. Depending who’s peering into his cage, either he’s got the makings of a steadfast companion who wants to cover someone’s face with kisses or he’s a vicious liability, hardwired to “snap” at some future moment and maul whoever’s around when he does.
Goodman says he’s just scared. When he growled at her family, she says, “that was at the height of his distrust of people, I guess especially with men. He was just taken off the street when I had him. He just needs someone to build up his confidence and train him in how to deal with all that fear.” She and her husband have since spent over $3,000 on health insurance for Lucky, on vet bills for his eye, and on medication, including “doggie Prozac,” which he’s taken twice a day for a year. Goodman says he’s less excitable since he started the antidepressants, but he’s still hostile toward men. So in December she hired a trainer to try to curb his aggression and make him more attractive to potential adopters.
Linda Widmer is a veteran volunteer with the Furry Friends Foundation, a shelter that focuses on pit bulls. She says this oft-cited statistic can’t be used to characterize the breed because it doesn’t reflect the inhumane conditions in which many pit bulls are raised and kept. A pit bull involved in an attack on a human, she says, was probably trained to behave that way by an irresponsible owner. “You never learn about how those dogs were raised in filthy cages, how they were starved, beaten, never given proper human contact,” she says. “How can we expect these dogs to be properly socialized but let people get away with treating them that way?”
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The pit bull is believed to have been bred from working terriers and English bulldogs, the latter named for their use in bullbaiting. When the sport was outlawed in England in 1835, dismayed enthusiasts started fighting the dogs against one another. They were bred for gameness, or the ability to last in the pit for hours without succumbing to pain or exhaustion. Most other dogs will snarl and back away after establishing dominance, but pit bulls were bred to take a challenger down.
Widmer says every dog at Furry Friends gets walked twice a day by a volunteer. If during a walk, or any other time, a volunteer notices aggressive tendencies in the dog, it’s scheduled for a temperament test. This means the animal is chained up and various stimuli are marched across its path so a trainer can note its reactions. These always include another dog and a cat, and a child if volunteers think the dog might be aggressive toward people. It’s not uncommon for pit bulls to growl, bark, and strain at the other animals, Widmer says, but it’s rare for them to react badly to a human.
The electronic collar, operated by a remote control in Moore’s hand, will send a shock to Lucky’s neck every time she presses a button. The intensity of the shock, she says, can be manipulated to feel as light as a quick poke with a pencil tip or as heavy as a brushup against a very hot pan. The collar is a tool of punishment: the dog is corrected whenever it does something wrong. The “reward” for stopping the wrong behavior is that the unpleasantness goes away. The trend among pet dog trainers is toward positive reinforcement, which involves rewarding good behavior with food or praise, but Moore believes it’s not an option for aggressive dogs. “No cookie pusher is ever gonna dominate a pit bull,” she says; it’s important for any dog owner to step quickly into the “alpha role,” but “with pit bulls, it’s crucial.”
