Pit bull's demeanor depends on who's holding the leash

San Francisco, CA -- Ralph the pit bull is excited. He sees his friend, Astrid Dahlman --

who used to walk him -- and strains at the leash. He jumps and whines and wags his tail. Suzanne Seraphin can barely contain him.

Dahlman smiles and says sweet things, then pats his head. Ralph sits and squirms. He wants loose and he wants attention.

A little bit of a belly rub calms him down. He rolls over and lies still, enjoying the rub, mouth half open, showing the strong jaws and teeth this kind of dog is noted for. They will bite and grip and tear and kill under some circumstances.

This is the same kind of dog that killed 12-year-old Nick Faibish in a hellish incident in San Francisco's Sunset District on June 3. The fatal mauling has set off a heated debate between city officials who would like to ban pit bulls and dog lovers who claim the animals are not to blame.

Seraphin and Dahlman are with an organization known as "Home at Last." They place animals from shelters into homes. They put a lot of animals in foster care, with people who know how to deal with them and prepare them for regular households, and then try to find people to adopt them.

They do that with all animals, but they end up working mostly with pit bulls because that's the animal most often taken to shelters, and they can be hard to place because of their notoriety.

The Berkeley animal shelter has about 60 dog cages, and more than 60 percent of the dogs there are pit bulls or pit bull mixes.

The San Francisco animal shelter had 60 dogs as of Friday, and 26 were pit bulls. Other shelters indicated they have a mixed bag of breeds and dog types, depending on their location.

Judy Choy, a supervisor with the San Francisco shelter, said news of fatal attacks by the dogs doesn't always mean people won't adopt them. The day Nicholas Faibish was killed, a young couple came to the shelter and looked at a young one. She told them to wait a day and think it over, imagining that they would change their minds. They came in the next day and took the pit bull.

Pit bulls are not actually a breed. The name is used generically for a group of breeds that includes the American pit bull terrier, the American Staffordshire terrier, the Staffordshire bull terrier, miniature and standard bull terriers and the American bulldog.

As such, they do not all look the same. Their coloring and size vary, but many are some combination of brown and white or gray. Their hair is short, their chests and shoulders are broad. They have wide mouths and strong jaws. Many have bobbed ears to prevent other animals from grabbing and biting them there.

According to published literature on the subject, the dogs originated in Europe in the 1700s. Farmers bred them to help handle bulls, and later that became a sport called "bullbaiting." The dogs would square off against a bull and grab it by the snout. It had to have strong jaws and teeth, and a thickly muscled body to withstand the tugging and shaking and head-butts.

Later, after bullbaiting was outlawed, the dogs were bred to fight other dogs, often in pits. Some were put into pits to see how many rats they could kill in a certain time period, thus the "pit" part of their name.

Seraphin said the breeding to fight is just one element of the pit bull's makeup. What is less known, she said, is that they were also bred to differentiate between humans and other animals. In much of the literature on the dogs' early days, it was noted that a dog handler had to be able to pull his dog out of a fight without getting bitten himself. Getting bitten meant disqualification for the dog, and death, too.

Alison Smith, a certified trainer and counselor with the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, has long studied animal behavior. She said pit bulls are socialized when they are 3 to 16 weeks old. If they are trained properly and have appropriate human contact, they will be fantastic companions for life. If not, they may be trained later, but you can never be sure the training will be permanent.

The bottom line, she said, is that dogs do what they are genetically designed to do.

"Pit bulls are great with people," she said. "They're bred to be aggressive with dogs and other animals."

Where the situation breaks down is over-breeding and poor handling. Pit bulls tend to be the dog of choice for gang members and methamphetamine addicts, and they proliferate in poor areas, both urban and rural. It can be a lethal mix because, as such, they don't get the proper care and attention from their owners and they suffer from too much inbreeding, Seraphin said.

Seraphin and Smith said pit bulls require a lot of attention. You can't keep one in the basement or yard and just let it be. Smith said the dog will get overly aroused by all sorts of stimulation with no way to let it out. If the dogs are not spayed or neutered, they can be more aggressive, especially if there is a male and female together, and the female is in heat. Likewise, the presence of children going through puberty will set off all sorts of hormones that can mess up the dogs' internal wiring.

Since the dogs are considered so macho, a lot of their owners don't want to neuter them, Smith said, further adding to the potential for problems.

Smith likened pit bulls to firearms. You can keep a loaded gun in the house. If you take care of it, respect it and use it properly, everything is fine. If it is misused or mistreated, bad things can happen. People can die.

E-mail John Koopman at jkoopman@sfchronicle.com.