The Pit Bull Placebo

The Pit Bull Placebo The Media, Myths and Politics of Canine Aggression by Karen Delise Anubis Publishing The Pit Bull Placebo The Media, Myths and Politics of Canine Aggression Copyright © 2007 Karen Delise Published by Anubis Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced (except for inclusion in reviews), disseminated or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, or the Internet/World Wide Web without written permission from the author or publisher. For further information, please contact: [email protected] or go to the National Canine Research Council at www.nationalcanineresearchcouncil.com Cover photo credit: Jon T. Miller Book design by Arbor Books, Inc. 19 Spear Road, Suite 301 Ramsey, NJ 07446 www.arborbooks.com Printed in the United States The Pit Bull Placebo The Media, Myths and Politics of Canine Aggression Karen Delise 1. The Pit Bull Placebo: The Media, Myths and Politics of Canine Aggression 2. Karen Delise 3. Pets/Pit Bulls/Human-animal communication Library of Congress Control Number: 2006910964 ISBN 10: 0-9721914-1-0 ISBN 13: 978-0-9721914-1-8 Dedication To my wonderful father, Mario Delise, who taught me about love and respect for all life and To Bianca, again and always— a dog whose courage, loyalty, and devotion is a testament to the timeless spirit of the dog. Table of Contents Fore word............................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................xiii Introduction........................................................................................................................xv Chapter 1 The Function of Dogs in 19th Century America..........................................1 Chapter 2 Imagery and the Media in 19th Century America: The Bloodhound ........20 Chapter 3 Creating Dangerous Dogs: The Newfoundland and the Northern Breeds.............................................................................36 Chapter 4 How Popularity and Function Influence Aggression .................................47 Chapter 5 The Reporting of Dog Attacks in Early 20th Century Media....................58 Chapter 6 The Use and Misuse of Courage: The Bulldog..........................................63 Chapter 7 The Media Re-Shapes an Image: The German Shepherd..........................72 Chapter 8 The Myth of the Super-Predator: The Doberman Pinscher .......................79 Chapter 9 Setting Dogs Up for Failure: The New Guard Dogs .................................88 Chapter 10 The Media Attacks a “Breed”: The Pit Bull...............................................95 Chapter 11 Pseudoscience and Hysteria Triumph ......................................................107 Chapter 12 Fighting Dogs: Branded with the Sins of Their Masters .........................130 Chapter 13 Sensationalism Replaces Common Sense................................................139 Chapter 14 The Real Causes for Dog Attacks ............................................................154 Chapter 15 The Pit Bull Placebo: Conclusions on Canine Aggression ......................171 Appendix A Dog Attacks as Reported in Northeastern Newspapers, 1864–1899 .......175 Appendix B Dog Attacks as Reported in U.S. Newspapers, 1960–1975.....................183 Appendix C Denver, Colorado—“Evidence” Used to Ban Pit Bulls (Breed Specific Legislation).....................................................................191 Appendix D Denver, Colorado—An Ineffective and Uninformed Approach to Dog Attacks .........................................................................197 Notes ................................................................................................................................201 Index ................................................................................................................................207 About the Author .............................................................................................................211 Foreword Placebo: Something of no inherent benefit that is done or said simply to placate or reassure somebody Emoti onally charged news accounts of a dog bite fatality can teach the wrong lesson. The purpose of THE PIT BULL PLACEBO: THE MEDIA MYTHS AND POLITICS OF CANINE AGGRESSION is to teach the right lesson. Karen Delise knows that understanding instances of canine aggression requires going beyond the news stories, to uncover the facts that reporters overlooked. It may take months for all the relevant facts to surface (if they ever do), a delay that a deadline-driven press may not abide. The press will have moved on to new stories long before that. Thus, Delise’s analysis of the exceedingly rare cases when human-canine interactions end in tragedy affords an understanding that news outlets may not be patient enough or persistent enough to uncover. The researchers who studied fatal dog attacks before her relied primarily on news accounts. Delise wanted to know what the news had not reported. She called police investigators, animal control agencies, veterinarians, even coroners familiar with an incident. She uncovered previously unreported facts, as well as facts that contradicted what had been reported in the newspapers and on television. Police investigators may have told her that the dog, which had been described in a news account as a family dog, had in fact been mal- nourished and uncared for; had a name like “Satan,” or no name at all; and had lived his life, without shelter, at the end of a chain. More than two decades of deliberate, concentrated, determined research has taken Delise beyond the details of the exceedingly rare tragedies in which she is the nation’s leading expert, to an understanding of our cultural habits about dogs that is paralleled in the most forward-thinking social science. THE PIT BULL PLACEBO explains how function, myth, media, and the marginal ele- ments in our society can combine to demonize a group of dogs, however precisely or vaguely defined, and to endanger our bond with all dogs. The first example for which we have detailed records is of the group of dogs called bloodhounds. In the mid-19th century, public attitudes toward these dogs paralleled attitudes toward their most controversial function, pursuing runaway slaves. vii viii Karen Delise Eventually, these bloodhounds fell from view, and we pushed other dogs into the spot- light, including the German Shepherd Dog and the Doberman Pinscher. By the 1980’s, a new dog had swept all the others aside: any dog that was called a “pit bull”. But there was more happening than just the substitution of one dog for another. Urban- ization and the reach and power of our information technology has intensified the plight of the dogs called pit bull, and made it qualitatively different from that which any other dog had faced. How did this happen? Prior to 1959, there had never been a systematic attempt to analyze dog bites using the tools of epidemiology. The first such study was published in 1959. Its authors, a public health doctor and three veterinarians, analyzed the incidents in their data set for a variety of owner, victim, and dog-related factors.1 More studies appeared in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And it is easy to understand why. Late in 1974, a study published in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Med- icine stated that the number of reported dog bites in New York City had increased by 37% between 1965 and 1972. The article was titled, “Dog Bites: An Unrecognized Epidemic.” 2 An Associated Press article the following February, carrying a very similar headline (“Dog Bites—Unrecognized Epidemic in the United States”), reported significant increases in dog bites in 10 other American cities besides New York.3 Now comes the bitter irony. The dog bite epidemic announced in the Academy Bul- letin and by the Associated Press had begun to subside even as the other news coverage of, and research into, dog-related injury grew more intense. Researchers in Baltimore, Mary- land, one of the cities included in the AP story, reported that new municipal policies had quickly turned the trend around. From a peak total of 6,922 in 1972, by 1976, dog bites had declined in Baltimore to 4,760.4 And this decline only steepened in the years that followed. For all of 2005, Baltimore had reports of fewer than 500 dog bites, according to its Department of Health Other cities that had been mentioned in the AP story, including New York,5 reported similar, dramatic decreases. Unfortunately for dogs, and for our bond with them, the announcement of the rise in dog bites was not followed up, in the popular press or in academic journals, by reports of the subsequent declines. Rather, the media and the academy, both producers and product of an increasingly risk-obsessed culture, painted an alarming picture of dogs, not as com- panions, but as sources of injury. The dog bite theme spawned a subset of research into those exceedingly rare occasions— rare then and rare now, by the way—where a dog kills a human being. The first American to publish on the subject was Centers for Disease Control veterinarian Dr. William Win- kler. Newspapers across the country publicized his findings when his report, “Human Deaths Induced by dog Bites, 1974-75,” appeared in the Journal of Public Health in 1977. A sec- ond paper

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