Marty
03-25-2008, 10:09 PM
Greenville,MS --The six pit bulls brought to Allen & Griffin Animal Hospital last week following a string of dog fighting arrests in Greenville were so friendly they could break your heart.
As veterinary technicians prepared to treat one animal's bloody wounds, the dog sat there obediently, wagging his tail whenever someone paused to pet him.
In the words of Belinda Alfred, director of the Animal Shelter of Greenville, this dog was more likely to lick you to death than bite you.
Alfred, like many veterinarians and animal rights activists, stresses that pit bulls are not naturally aggressive dogs.
According to advocates at organizations ranging from the Humane Society of the United States to the Animal Relief & Rescue Fellowship of Leland, it is only generations of selective breeding and a lifetime of violent training that give pit bulls the blood lust to tear each other apart in a dog fight.
In other words, you have to brutalize a dog to make it game.
“Game” is a peculiar word in the specialized vocabulary of dog fighting. It refers not to the flesh of a hunted animal - though it could easily mean that - but to a dog's propensity to fight other dogs.
Read the Web sites of dog fighting enthusiasts - there are many such sites on the Internet - and you will find that “gameness” is the quality they desire most in a pit bull.
“The idea of game is that the dog doesn't give up no matter what,” says Laura Bevan, the Humane Society's southeast regional director. “It can be injured, it can be bleeding, but it's trying to crawl across the pit to get to the other dog.”
The pit bulls at Allen & Griffin definitely had game.
Put two of them in the same room, and they tried to tear each other apart.
“If you get them around another dog, they go wild,” said Zondra Martin, hospital administrator at Allen & Griffin. “They're very aggressive.”
As Martin walked around the hospital, she pointed out the dogs and their injuries. All had scars from a lifetime of fighting. Most had very recent-looking wounds, as well.
One had a laceration all the way through its lip.
Martin pointed to one pit bull, a black dog curled up in a cage, that she said would probably have to be euthanized because it was so aggressive.
It was hard to imagine this dog, the very picture of vulnerability at that moment, ripping into the flesh of another animal.
But, like the dog fighting culture that creates them, game pit bulls have some dark secrets.
n n n
Last week's dog fighting arrests surprised many in Greenville. Even Lt. Misty Litton, the officer investigating the cases, said she did not realize there was organized dog fighting in Greenville until police received two phone calls last week alerting them to the activity.
But the signs were there if you knew where to look.
Shane Wilkerson, a veterinarian at Allen & Griffin, says he sees a few dogs a month that he can tell have been in previous fights.
“Most (dog fighters) don't seek a vet's attention,” he said. “Unless it's really severe, or the dog's worth something.”
Nevertheless, Wilkerson says the same day Allen & Griffin received the first four pit bulls confiscated in the dog fighting arrests, he treated another dog - this one for an ordinary client - that had obvious dog fighting scars.
“You could tell that he's been in more than one serious dog fight,” Wilkerson said. “But,” he added, “it's a little more difficult to prove.”
Linda Merideth, an Animal Relief & Rescue Fellowship volunteer, says ARRF commonly sees pit bulls coming to the Leland animal shelter with scars covering their entire bodies. She says the trend seems to have picked up in the past two years.
Merideth has a friend who once saw two young men pulling a pit bull behind a car on Tate Road. The dog had a tire draped around its neck - a technique that dog fighting experts say trainers will commonly use to build a dog's neck strength.
The friend estimates the young men were driving 25 to 30 miles per hour.
“It was fast for a dog to run, let me just put it like that,” she says.
She says she did not report the incident to police out of fear for her own safety.
She did not want to be named for this story, either.
“You just don't know about those kind of people,” she said. “If they'll do that to a dog, they'll do that to you.”
According to Humane Society regional director Bevan, dog fighting, once a legal activity promoted by the United Kennel Club, has become all but invisible since states began toughening their legislation against it in the mid-1970s.
Dog fighting is now a felony in all 50 states. But, Bevan says, just because it has gone out of sight doesn't mean it has gone away.
She says public fights have been displaced by a subterranean dog fighting culture that thrives on the anonymous connectivity of the Internet and the mystique of secretive street fights.
“When the first set of laws passed, it went underground pretty deep,” she says. “The street fighting, that didn't exist 20 or 30 years ago. And now it's a big issue in cities of all sizes.”
Eric Sakach, the director of the Humane Society's West Coast office, used to go to dog fights during his 19 years as an undercover investigator for the organization. He says dog fighting is linked to many other forms of criminal activity.
“If you take enjoyment out of watching two animals rip apart each other, generally you're not a very nice person to begin with,” Sakach says. “One raid that I was at, drugs and guns went flying, there was prostitution going on inside the house, they had several outstanding warrants. It's a very violent world, and violent people are involved with it.”
A 2005 study of dog fighting by the Michigan State University College of Law supports Sakach's observations.
“Dog fighters are violent criminals that engage in a whole host of peripheral criminal activities,” the study found. “Many are heavily involved in organized crime, racketeering, drug distribution, or gangs, and they arrange and attend the fights as a forum for gambling and drug trafficking.”
Greenville police say they have not found any evidence linking last week's dog fighting incidents to deeper criminal activity.
“But,” says Lt. Litton, “a lot of times criminal activity will go hand in hand with something else.”
n n n
The block between Cately Street and Broadway, bounded by Gloster and Nelson, could probably be considered a rough part of town. As I walk up the block where Elvis Battle and Ronnie Thomas were arrested for dog fighting last week, the smell of pot hits me in the face.
It's 3 o'clock on a Thursday afternoon.
“You know what this tastes like?” a young woman asks as I walk by, holding out the burned end of a joint.
I don't get a very warm welcome at 414 Cately Street, the house where Battle and Thomas were arrested on dog fighting and animal cruelty charges.
When I approach a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings sitting on the front porch, one of them approaches to within breathing distance of where I'm standing.
“You in the wrong place, man,” he says.
I step back to the sidewalk - off their property - and explain who I am. I tell them I'm looking for information about dog fighting in the neighborhood. I offer to keep people's names out of it if they want.
“We don't even own dogs,” one young man says, as a large dog barks repeatedly from a nearby yard. “We ain't got nothing but shih tzus around here.”
I leave a handful of business cards with the young men, ask them to call me if they should suddenly feel interested in talking to me off the record. I feel completely ridiculous as I do this. I doubt whether any of them will call, but hope that maybe one of them will.
Continued below...
As veterinary technicians prepared to treat one animal's bloody wounds, the dog sat there obediently, wagging his tail whenever someone paused to pet him.
In the words of Belinda Alfred, director of the Animal Shelter of Greenville, this dog was more likely to lick you to death than bite you.
Alfred, like many veterinarians and animal rights activists, stresses that pit bulls are not naturally aggressive dogs.
According to advocates at organizations ranging from the Humane Society of the United States to the Animal Relief & Rescue Fellowship of Leland, it is only generations of selective breeding and a lifetime of violent training that give pit bulls the blood lust to tear each other apart in a dog fight.
In other words, you have to brutalize a dog to make it game.
“Game” is a peculiar word in the specialized vocabulary of dog fighting. It refers not to the flesh of a hunted animal - though it could easily mean that - but to a dog's propensity to fight other dogs.
Read the Web sites of dog fighting enthusiasts - there are many such sites on the Internet - and you will find that “gameness” is the quality they desire most in a pit bull.
“The idea of game is that the dog doesn't give up no matter what,” says Laura Bevan, the Humane Society's southeast regional director. “It can be injured, it can be bleeding, but it's trying to crawl across the pit to get to the other dog.”
The pit bulls at Allen & Griffin definitely had game.
Put two of them in the same room, and they tried to tear each other apart.
“If you get them around another dog, they go wild,” said Zondra Martin, hospital administrator at Allen & Griffin. “They're very aggressive.”
As Martin walked around the hospital, she pointed out the dogs and their injuries. All had scars from a lifetime of fighting. Most had very recent-looking wounds, as well.
One had a laceration all the way through its lip.
Martin pointed to one pit bull, a black dog curled up in a cage, that she said would probably have to be euthanized because it was so aggressive.
It was hard to imagine this dog, the very picture of vulnerability at that moment, ripping into the flesh of another animal.
But, like the dog fighting culture that creates them, game pit bulls have some dark secrets.
n n n
Last week's dog fighting arrests surprised many in Greenville. Even Lt. Misty Litton, the officer investigating the cases, said she did not realize there was organized dog fighting in Greenville until police received two phone calls last week alerting them to the activity.
But the signs were there if you knew where to look.
Shane Wilkerson, a veterinarian at Allen & Griffin, says he sees a few dogs a month that he can tell have been in previous fights.
“Most (dog fighters) don't seek a vet's attention,” he said. “Unless it's really severe, or the dog's worth something.”
Nevertheless, Wilkerson says the same day Allen & Griffin received the first four pit bulls confiscated in the dog fighting arrests, he treated another dog - this one for an ordinary client - that had obvious dog fighting scars.
“You could tell that he's been in more than one serious dog fight,” Wilkerson said. “But,” he added, “it's a little more difficult to prove.”
Linda Merideth, an Animal Relief & Rescue Fellowship volunteer, says ARRF commonly sees pit bulls coming to the Leland animal shelter with scars covering their entire bodies. She says the trend seems to have picked up in the past two years.
Merideth has a friend who once saw two young men pulling a pit bull behind a car on Tate Road. The dog had a tire draped around its neck - a technique that dog fighting experts say trainers will commonly use to build a dog's neck strength.
The friend estimates the young men were driving 25 to 30 miles per hour.
“It was fast for a dog to run, let me just put it like that,” she says.
She says she did not report the incident to police out of fear for her own safety.
She did not want to be named for this story, either.
“You just don't know about those kind of people,” she said. “If they'll do that to a dog, they'll do that to you.”
According to Humane Society regional director Bevan, dog fighting, once a legal activity promoted by the United Kennel Club, has become all but invisible since states began toughening their legislation against it in the mid-1970s.
Dog fighting is now a felony in all 50 states. But, Bevan says, just because it has gone out of sight doesn't mean it has gone away.
She says public fights have been displaced by a subterranean dog fighting culture that thrives on the anonymous connectivity of the Internet and the mystique of secretive street fights.
“When the first set of laws passed, it went underground pretty deep,” she says. “The street fighting, that didn't exist 20 or 30 years ago. And now it's a big issue in cities of all sizes.”
Eric Sakach, the director of the Humane Society's West Coast office, used to go to dog fights during his 19 years as an undercover investigator for the organization. He says dog fighting is linked to many other forms of criminal activity.
“If you take enjoyment out of watching two animals rip apart each other, generally you're not a very nice person to begin with,” Sakach says. “One raid that I was at, drugs and guns went flying, there was prostitution going on inside the house, they had several outstanding warrants. It's a very violent world, and violent people are involved with it.”
A 2005 study of dog fighting by the Michigan State University College of Law supports Sakach's observations.
“Dog fighters are violent criminals that engage in a whole host of peripheral criminal activities,” the study found. “Many are heavily involved in organized crime, racketeering, drug distribution, or gangs, and they arrange and attend the fights as a forum for gambling and drug trafficking.”
Greenville police say they have not found any evidence linking last week's dog fighting incidents to deeper criminal activity.
“But,” says Lt. Litton, “a lot of times criminal activity will go hand in hand with something else.”
n n n
The block between Cately Street and Broadway, bounded by Gloster and Nelson, could probably be considered a rough part of town. As I walk up the block where Elvis Battle and Ronnie Thomas were arrested for dog fighting last week, the smell of pot hits me in the face.
It's 3 o'clock on a Thursday afternoon.
“You know what this tastes like?” a young woman asks as I walk by, holding out the burned end of a joint.
I don't get a very warm welcome at 414 Cately Street, the house where Battle and Thomas were arrested on dog fighting and animal cruelty charges.
When I approach a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings sitting on the front porch, one of them approaches to within breathing distance of where I'm standing.
“You in the wrong place, man,” he says.
I step back to the sidewalk - off their property - and explain who I am. I tell them I'm looking for information about dog fighting in the neighborhood. I offer to keep people's names out of it if they want.
“We don't even own dogs,” one young man says, as a large dog barks repeatedly from a nearby yard. “We ain't got nothing but shih tzus around here.”
I leave a handful of business cards with the young men, ask them to call me if they should suddenly feel interested in talking to me off the record. I feel completely ridiculous as I do this. I doubt whether any of them will call, but hope that maybe one of them will.
Continued below...