Phebes
09-10-2007, 10:06 AM
Menace Unleashed (http://pitbull.commercialappeal-web.com/)
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A special project by The Commercial Appeal (http://www.commercialappeal.com/)
Comments? email: hotbutton@commercialappeal.com (hotbutton@commercialappeal.com)
phone: 901.529.6477
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Mean dogs on mean streets
Even for an animal-control officer of Ivan Russell’s experience, the scene was unusually gruesome.
At a backyard pit bull-breeding operation in Whitehaven, Russell arrived to find the bloodied carcass of a pit bull attacked while giving birth. Three of her puppies lay dead, in her dog house, with two others alive and whimpering.
Another bloody canine — the one involved in the attack — sat quietly, tied up by police, while still more pit bulls tugged at chains or romped around. No food or water.
Scenes like the one in Whitehaven show how pit bulls — long beloved as family pets, even the cuddly symbol of a 1950s shoe company — have been swept up in a culture of cruelty and rendered a growing public-safety menace.
Thousands of pit bulls enjoy docile lives with loving owners, but in tougher neighborhoods of Memphis, they’re bred to serve as status symbols; brutalized to become weapons or blood sport for gangs. The muscular terriers are tied to logging chains, pitted against other dogs and trained to attack humans.
With owners staking out breeding stock in backyards and selling puppies on street corners, pit bull populations have exploded into a Memphis plague. For many, it’s a short, cruel life that ends in a bloody fight or at Memphis Animal Services, where nearly 2,000 are euthanized annually.
Pit bulls are a popular breed in Shelby County, and they accounted for nearly 40 percent of all dog bites reported to the city last year. And with many left to roam dangerously, pit bulls are the leading cause of complaints to animal-control officials.
In addition to the safety threats — horrifically underscored by the near-fatal mauling of a man whose hand was torn off in South Memphis last month — pit bulls increasingly are targeted by thieves lured by the $1,000 or more that a litter can fetch.
But since many pit bulls remain family pets as gentle as black Labs, the dichotomy within the breed has left shelters, lawmakers, rescuers and responsible dog owners grappling for solutions.
More than 230 cities in 32 states have banned pit bulls, which a federal study found have been responsible for more fatal maulings nationwide in recent decades than any other breed. Other cities, including Memphis, have imposed no-adoption policies for the dogs.
Tennessee lawmakers are looking at ways to put more bite in the current dog laws.
Memphis Animal Services officials want the city to consider an anti-tethering measure — a step already enacted in West Memphis — and a ban on the sale of live animals at street corners and flea markets, as well as other measures.
In the meantime, the city’s main solution is to round up stray pit bulls and kill them at rates of about 40 per week.
On the front lines
The task of corralling pit bulls and other dogs falls to Memphis Animals Services, which was down 16 employees during a hiring freeze for a couple years but is now back to a full complement of 43.
On a recent, cold February morning, four animal control trucks, lights flashing, nets whipping in the wind, sped west down Chelsea — a concrete urban safari pursuing the neighborhood strays.
The trucks rumble past scowling neighbors, past overgrown yards filled with sofas and televisions, past “R.I.P.” signs memorializing people named Tweety and Terrell.
The caravan raced on until it reached yards where stray dogs were sleeping or nosing through trash. In an instant, seven uniformed officers with big nets leapt from their trucks and charged like pole vaulters to swarm the animals.
The officers operate by a simple credo: If it’s not chained or fenced, it’s going on a truck.
“I want these dogs off the street,” said Russell. “We got 50 dogs last week, just in this neighborhood. We’re going to keep on, and it’s going to make a difference.”
A national dilemma
The pit bull problem isn’t unique hardly unique to Memphis. Of the 73 million dogs in America, as many as 4.8 million are pit bulls, experts say.
Pit bulls once filled only 10 percent of the cages at municipal animal shelters; today it’s more than half.
Memphis moved to ban the breed in 1990 after teacher Betty Lou Stidham was mauled to death by a neighbor’s two pit bulls. Because the City Council targeted pit bulls only, however, the law was deemed unconstitutional a year later by the Tennessee Court of Appeals and never took effect.
No one has died of a dog mauling in Memphis since Stidham.
In the intervening years since the Tennessee Court of appellate court’s ruling, the squat, muscular terriers have spread like cockroaches in many Memphis’ toughest neighborhoods.
“Since pit bulls moved next door to me, it’s been one thing after another,” said Hickory Hill resident Butch Harper.
“These young boys will walk down the middle of the street, not the sidewalk, the middle of the street, four abreast with pit bulls tugging at the end of a leash. They think they are so tough. The dogs don’t make you tough, but they make you tough to live with.”
Inherently vicious?
As dangerous as some seem today, pit bulls had a much more innocent past.
In England in the 1800s, the dog was initially bred for bull-baiting, a sport where the dog would bite a bull, usually on the face, then hang on as the bull slung it back and forth.
That sport was outlawed and the dogs began fighting one another in pits, thus the origin of the name. That sport, too, was outlawed in the early 1900s and slowly the breed gained acceptance as an all-American pet, propelled by several positive canine role models.
Petey, the lovable black and white dog with the ring around his eye from “The Little Rascals,” was a pit bull. So was Tige, the dog in the popular Buster Brown shoes advertisements. Stubby the pit bull was a World War I hero.
“If you look at old photographs, the dog at the center of the family portrait is a pit bull,” said Catherine Hedges, a pit bull rescuer from Chicago who runs the Web site dontbullymybreed.com (http://dontbullymybreed.com/).
“They were known as the nanny breed because of how well they do with children.”
But an emerging pop culture in the late 1980s overtook that image.
Hollywood portrayed them in movies as bad dogs. They were seen fighting each other in rap videos. Soon, anyone whose ego was measured by his dog’s ferocity had a pit bull on the end of a chain.
“The biggest problem is pop culture that glorifies dog fighting and pit bulls,” said John Goodwin of the Humane Society of the United States.
“Rap videos show scenes of dogs fighting or lunging and it permeates the whole culture. We find the dogs mostly with young black males but they are certainly with the white and Hispanic population too.”
The dogs were already known for their powerful jaws, strong body and high threshold for pain. But these genetic attributes have been exaggerated through extreme workouts.
Owners began leashing their dogs to exercise treadmills to enhance endurance, They secured them in backyards with huge, heavy logging chains that, over time, gave their muscular necks even greater power.
Alan Beck, director for the Center for the Human Animal Bond at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue University, believes pits bulls are indeed different, agreeing with politicians who call them “inherently dangerous.”
“Pointers point, herding dogs herd and pit bulls bite,” he said at a recent conference of shelter managers in Nashville that debated the pit bull issue.
Beck said the raw numbers show that pit bulls are statistically responsible for more human deaths than any other breed and that banning them will help curb dog attacks.
But not all experts agree.
“It’s easy to blame the breed,’’ said Karen Delise, author of “Fatal Dog Attacks.” a book on fatal dog attacks. “That lets man off the hook. We don’t have to arrest and prosecute people and jail them for what they do. We’ll just kill the dog and that will fix it. But it doesn’t. And it won’t.”
Uses and abuses
Some of the dogs are trained to attack humans, others to fight in a bloody , high-stakes sport in back alleys and vacant lots.
“A man called me and asked me if my puppies were tough,” said Gerald Slowey, who owns American pit bull terriers that he shows in United Kennel Club competition.
“I told him they were just puppies. He told me to take a puppy and chop off its paw. If it whimpered, kill the whole litter, that they weren’t any good. Can you believe that? That’s what they are doing to these dogs out there.”
Pit bull puppies, like vegetables grown in backyard gardens, are a commodity sold through an untaxed, underground economy. But that’s not to say the process is hidden.
Backyards across Memphis are filled with pit bulls, chained for life just out of reach of one another, with one purpose — to breed.
These breeders typically peddle their puppies on street corners. Among the most popular spots, the busy intersection of Yale and Austin Peay in Raleigh, which can become a pit bull flea market on a sunny Saturday.
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A special project by The Commercial Appeal (http://www.commercialappeal.com/)
Comments? email: hotbutton@commercialappeal.com (hotbutton@commercialappeal.com)
phone: 901.529.6477
<!-- /header -->
http://www.commercialappeal-web.com/drupal5/files/images/pb_slideshow.jpg (http://www.commercialappeal-web.com/slideshows/?Menace_Unleashed)
Mean dogs on mean streets
Even for an animal-control officer of Ivan Russell’s experience, the scene was unusually gruesome.
At a backyard pit bull-breeding operation in Whitehaven, Russell arrived to find the bloodied carcass of a pit bull attacked while giving birth. Three of her puppies lay dead, in her dog house, with two others alive and whimpering.
Another bloody canine — the one involved in the attack — sat quietly, tied up by police, while still more pit bulls tugged at chains or romped around. No food or water.
Scenes like the one in Whitehaven show how pit bulls — long beloved as family pets, even the cuddly symbol of a 1950s shoe company — have been swept up in a culture of cruelty and rendered a growing public-safety menace.
Thousands of pit bulls enjoy docile lives with loving owners, but in tougher neighborhoods of Memphis, they’re bred to serve as status symbols; brutalized to become weapons or blood sport for gangs. The muscular terriers are tied to logging chains, pitted against other dogs and trained to attack humans.
With owners staking out breeding stock in backyards and selling puppies on street corners, pit bull populations have exploded into a Memphis plague. For many, it’s a short, cruel life that ends in a bloody fight or at Memphis Animal Services, where nearly 2,000 are euthanized annually.
Pit bulls are a popular breed in Shelby County, and they accounted for nearly 40 percent of all dog bites reported to the city last year. And with many left to roam dangerously, pit bulls are the leading cause of complaints to animal-control officials.
In addition to the safety threats — horrifically underscored by the near-fatal mauling of a man whose hand was torn off in South Memphis last month — pit bulls increasingly are targeted by thieves lured by the $1,000 or more that a litter can fetch.
But since many pit bulls remain family pets as gentle as black Labs, the dichotomy within the breed has left shelters, lawmakers, rescuers and responsible dog owners grappling for solutions.
More than 230 cities in 32 states have banned pit bulls, which a federal study found have been responsible for more fatal maulings nationwide in recent decades than any other breed. Other cities, including Memphis, have imposed no-adoption policies for the dogs.
Tennessee lawmakers are looking at ways to put more bite in the current dog laws.
Memphis Animal Services officials want the city to consider an anti-tethering measure — a step already enacted in West Memphis — and a ban on the sale of live animals at street corners and flea markets, as well as other measures.
In the meantime, the city’s main solution is to round up stray pit bulls and kill them at rates of about 40 per week.
On the front lines
The task of corralling pit bulls and other dogs falls to Memphis Animals Services, which was down 16 employees during a hiring freeze for a couple years but is now back to a full complement of 43.
On a recent, cold February morning, four animal control trucks, lights flashing, nets whipping in the wind, sped west down Chelsea — a concrete urban safari pursuing the neighborhood strays.
The trucks rumble past scowling neighbors, past overgrown yards filled with sofas and televisions, past “R.I.P.” signs memorializing people named Tweety and Terrell.
The caravan raced on until it reached yards where stray dogs were sleeping or nosing through trash. In an instant, seven uniformed officers with big nets leapt from their trucks and charged like pole vaulters to swarm the animals.
The officers operate by a simple credo: If it’s not chained or fenced, it’s going on a truck.
“I want these dogs off the street,” said Russell. “We got 50 dogs last week, just in this neighborhood. We’re going to keep on, and it’s going to make a difference.”
A national dilemma
The pit bull problem isn’t unique hardly unique to Memphis. Of the 73 million dogs in America, as many as 4.8 million are pit bulls, experts say.
Pit bulls once filled only 10 percent of the cages at municipal animal shelters; today it’s more than half.
Memphis moved to ban the breed in 1990 after teacher Betty Lou Stidham was mauled to death by a neighbor’s two pit bulls. Because the City Council targeted pit bulls only, however, the law was deemed unconstitutional a year later by the Tennessee Court of Appeals and never took effect.
No one has died of a dog mauling in Memphis since Stidham.
In the intervening years since the Tennessee Court of appellate court’s ruling, the squat, muscular terriers have spread like cockroaches in many Memphis’ toughest neighborhoods.
“Since pit bulls moved next door to me, it’s been one thing after another,” said Hickory Hill resident Butch Harper.
“These young boys will walk down the middle of the street, not the sidewalk, the middle of the street, four abreast with pit bulls tugging at the end of a leash. They think they are so tough. The dogs don’t make you tough, but they make you tough to live with.”
Inherently vicious?
As dangerous as some seem today, pit bulls had a much more innocent past.
In England in the 1800s, the dog was initially bred for bull-baiting, a sport where the dog would bite a bull, usually on the face, then hang on as the bull slung it back and forth.
That sport was outlawed and the dogs began fighting one another in pits, thus the origin of the name. That sport, too, was outlawed in the early 1900s and slowly the breed gained acceptance as an all-American pet, propelled by several positive canine role models.
Petey, the lovable black and white dog with the ring around his eye from “The Little Rascals,” was a pit bull. So was Tige, the dog in the popular Buster Brown shoes advertisements. Stubby the pit bull was a World War I hero.
“If you look at old photographs, the dog at the center of the family portrait is a pit bull,” said Catherine Hedges, a pit bull rescuer from Chicago who runs the Web site dontbullymybreed.com (http://dontbullymybreed.com/).
“They were known as the nanny breed because of how well they do with children.”
But an emerging pop culture in the late 1980s overtook that image.
Hollywood portrayed them in movies as bad dogs. They were seen fighting each other in rap videos. Soon, anyone whose ego was measured by his dog’s ferocity had a pit bull on the end of a chain.
“The biggest problem is pop culture that glorifies dog fighting and pit bulls,” said John Goodwin of the Humane Society of the United States.
“Rap videos show scenes of dogs fighting or lunging and it permeates the whole culture. We find the dogs mostly with young black males but they are certainly with the white and Hispanic population too.”
The dogs were already known for their powerful jaws, strong body and high threshold for pain. But these genetic attributes have been exaggerated through extreme workouts.
Owners began leashing their dogs to exercise treadmills to enhance endurance, They secured them in backyards with huge, heavy logging chains that, over time, gave their muscular necks even greater power.
Alan Beck, director for the Center for the Human Animal Bond at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue University, believes pits bulls are indeed different, agreeing with politicians who call them “inherently dangerous.”
“Pointers point, herding dogs herd and pit bulls bite,” he said at a recent conference of shelter managers in Nashville that debated the pit bull issue.
Beck said the raw numbers show that pit bulls are statistically responsible for more human deaths than any other breed and that banning them will help curb dog attacks.
But not all experts agree.
“It’s easy to blame the breed,’’ said Karen Delise, author of “Fatal Dog Attacks.” a book on fatal dog attacks. “That lets man off the hook. We don’t have to arrest and prosecute people and jail them for what they do. We’ll just kill the dog and that will fix it. But it doesn’t. And it won’t.”
Uses and abuses
Some of the dogs are trained to attack humans, others to fight in a bloody , high-stakes sport in back alleys and vacant lots.
“A man called me and asked me if my puppies were tough,” said Gerald Slowey, who owns American pit bull terriers that he shows in United Kennel Club competition.
“I told him they were just puppies. He told me to take a puppy and chop off its paw. If it whimpered, kill the whole litter, that they weren’t any good. Can you believe that? That’s what they are doing to these dogs out there.”
Pit bull puppies, like vegetables grown in backyard gardens, are a commodity sold through an untaxed, underground economy. But that’s not to say the process is hidden.
Backyards across Memphis are filled with pit bulls, chained for life just out of reach of one another, with one purpose — to breed.
These breeders typically peddle their puppies on street corners. Among the most popular spots, the busy intersection of Yale and Austin Peay in Raleigh, which can become a pit bull flea market on a sunny Saturday.