Why are most dogs in shelters pit bulls? Expert Advice

WHY Are There So Many Pit Bulls In Shelters?

This is obviously a big question, and one with a lot of components. But as far as I can tell, there are two primary reasons for Pit Bull intake in shelters being as high as it is.

One, overpopulation: Whether it’s backyard breeding or casual breeding or just plain breeding, there’s way too much breeding of Pit Bulls going on. It doesn’t help that Pit Bulls tend to have large(ish) litters, anywhere from 6-12 puppies per litter (sometimes it’s more, and sometimes it’s less).

The second reason? Breed Specific Legislation and Pit Bull Prejudice. I referred previously to the challenges associated with Pit Bulls. Mainly, I was talking about the shelter problem (as I previously indicated) and BSL/prejudice, which can make it extremely difficult for families to take in – and sometimes keep – Pit Bulls.

Pit bulls have historically been bred for dog fighting and entertainment. This history dates back to the 1800s, according to the Wake County Animal Shelter.

According to their analysis, deadly dog attacks are on the rise and pit bull attacks specifically are contributing to that rise.The

However, Jennifer Federico, director of the Wake County Animal Center, hasnt had problems with her four pit bulls adopted from the countys animal shelter. She said they are joy in her life and she is lucky to have them.

Adamson pointed to this testing to encourage people that pit bulls are a safe breed to adopt if cared for properly.

Overpopulation

First, let’s delve into the Pit Bull breeding issue – and let there be no doubt that it is, indeed, an issue. Obviously, if the country’s shelters are full of Pit Bulls waiting to be put down – and if Pit Bulls are being killed at such an insane rate (599 to 1) – there’s too much breeding going on, plain and simple.

But why are Pit Bulls being bred so much?

I talked to Dr. Emily Weiss of the ASPCA about all of this (read her fascinating blog-post on this topic for more information), and here’s what she had to say:

That’s right, one of the big reasons so many Pit Bulls are ending up in shelters is that they’re becoming more and more popular with each passing year. Of course, we’ve known for some time about this increased popularity. In 1993, Pit Bulls made up less than 1% of the overall dog population in this country. Ten years later, that percentage had increased fivefold, and that’s just of the dogs that were registered. In the 12 years since, you can bet that the Pit Bull population has only grown larger.

Moreover, in a 2012 study conducted by VetStreet, the American Pit Bull Terrier ranked among the top 3 pets in 28 states, and was number one in Rhode Island (which not so long ago passed a law prohibiting BSL). That’s a long way to go for a dog that was once feared far and wide thanks to media hysteria.

In many ways, popularity is a good thing. Popularity means that Pit Bulls are being viewed in a more positive light. It means that prejudice against them is decreasing, and as a result, so, too, is Breed Specific Legislation. Not only are fewer states, cities, and counties resorting to BSL – which has been proven time and again to be costly and ineffective – but many states/cities/counties are softening their anti-Pit Bull laws, and in some cases repealing them altogether.

Obviously, few people are going to suggest that we actively attempt to make Pit Bulls unpopular as a means of decreasing their number in shelters. But to a degree, if these dogs are popular, they’re probably always going to rank a bit higher in terms of shelter intake than, say, the Mexican Hairless Dog. After all, the Labrador Retriever – America’s most popular dog – ranks number 3 in shelter intake.

Then again, if Labs rank number one in popularity and number three in shelter intake – and Pits rank number one in shelter intake and somewhere lower than number one in popularity – there has to be more at work here than mere demand. Which brings us to our next point:

Why are Valley animal shelters full of so many pit bull mixes?

We need to talk about pit bulls again. It’s not doing them or us any good to pretend that they don’t exist, and aren’t the dogs still dying in shelters.

They need us to see them, talk about them, advocate for them. They need us to render them visible.

I don’t know about you, but I spent this summer finding myself missing the days when there were organizations in our industry putting breed discrimination at the front and center of all conversations.

They were in our faces constantly, challenging our beliefs and practices, and showing us, with science, that looks don’t equal behavior. At one point, I almost got one group’s tagline tattooed on my arm: All dogs are individuals.

That conversation began to change over the last decade when animal welfare started talking more critically about the discourse around pit bulls, as much as the animals themselves.

Many of us came to believe that even using the word pit bull could be harmful and misleading.

The term pit bull, of course, refers not to any specific breed of dog, but to dogs who belong to several breeds or who merely share some physical traits, and not even specific traits at that; it’s a highly subjective guessing game of what does and doesn’t qualify as a pit bull, with no correct answer since visual breed identification of this sort comes down to a matter of personal opinion, and not objective standards.

Some dogs identified as pit bulls are 25 pounds and slender. Others are 90 pounds and chunky. At its essence, the term pit bull is a visual label based on arbitrary and fluid criteria and varies widely regionally, and shelter to shelter, and in the eye of the beholder.

As we have consistently reinforced to the public, over the last decade, the physical characteristics do not translate to any shared behaviors or personality traits. Two pit bulls may be as similar or dissimilar as any two other dogs. They are, as the tagline goes, individuals.

But we ran into a conundrum: How could animal welfare professionals, on the one hand, ask the public to believe us when we said that the term pit bull is essentially meaningless—and on the other keep advocating for dogs lumped together under that supposedly meaningless label?

(The label is so tricky and slippery that it’s hard to even know if we should put quotation marks around “pit bull” or not; in this blog we won’t, from now on, for the sake of trying to minimize confusion.)

Within the field, we had passionate conversations, and disagreements, about what language to use—and, tied up in there, about whether animal advocacy and advocacy for people should, or could, be disaggregated or considered one unified pursuit.

In 2016, this conversation was beautifully detailed in Bronwen Dickey’s book “Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon.” This book provided us a thorough understanding of the role people have played in constructing what we imagine today to be the pit bull and the ways in which this name has come to be so heavily imbued with socially constructed meaning—most of which doesn’t have much at all to do with the dogs themselves, but rather, the people who are associated with them.

Those were, without question, the most generative, critically thoughtful days for the conversations around pit bulls—and therefore shelter dogs, since to the extent we understand there is a type of dog called the pit bull, they are unquestionably the dogs most at risk of coming into, and losing their lives in, U.S. animal shelters.

Since these exciting, provocative days, we’ve reached an uncomfortable point where instead of provocative conversations about how we should talk about pit bulls, we now find ourselves without new resources and information, at a time when advancing this discussion is still so critical to lifesaving and keeping families together.

You can see this front and center in two complementary, equally problematic narratives that have taken hold.

The first is articulated in a recent Axios story called The Great American Dog Shortage—the premise of which is that there are not enough dogs for all the people who want them, and that animal shelters no longer have enough “desirable” pets to meet the market demand.

The second is that the animals left in shelters just aren’t the ones who people want. Keep in mind, as you think that one through, that 6.5 million animals are still entering U.S. shelters every year, and an estimated 1.5 million are still dying in them.

Behind this second narrative is the underlying assertions that dogs left in shelters are damaged, broken, undesirable, unworthy, unhealthy, or otherwise “unadoptable” for any number of reasons, including because they are the “wrong” breed or type.

Meanwhile the pets left in shelters who are still dying, are being rendered almost entirely invisible in these conversations.

If these conversations continue unchecked, dogs—disproportionately, inarguably, the dogs we used to call pit bulls—are likely to continue to die. And we’re likely to justify those deaths because “no one wants those dogs.”

We need to take a sharp U-turn and return to the hard conversations about pit bull dogs. For the sake of dogs and the people who love them, we must not allow ourselves to move on from the critical questions about why pit bull dogs still fill our shelters, languish in our shelters, and die in our shelters.

Here are just a few starting points for the conversations we need to be having on behalf of the dogs we know as pit bulls.