Today is National Pit Bull Awareness Day & there are plenty of things I could write about pit bulls. I could tell you they can be loving dogs. I could share pictures of them curled up on sofas or tell you we shouldn’t judge a dog by the way they look. All perfectly reasonable messages but there is a much bigger issue surrounding these dogs which I think deserves our attention.
In some parts of the world what a dog looks like doesn’t simply influence what somebody thinks about them. It can determine what happens to them under the law.
Here in the UK we have lived with breed specific legislation since the Dangerous Dogs Act was introduced in 1991. Certain types of dog are prohibited & one of them is the pit bull terrier type.
The word type is important.
We aren’t simply talking about dogs whose ancestry can be traced neatly back to a recognised breed. A dog can be considered a prohibited type because of its physical characteristics. In other words what a dog looks like can have enormous legal consequences. That becomes particularly troubling when we look at how good humans actually are at identifying the ancestry of dogs simply by looking at them.
Researchers have tested this. One study involved 120 dogs at four animal shelters in the United States. Shelter staff were asked to identify pit bull type dogs by appearance & those assessments were then compared with DNA results. DNA testing identified 25 dogs as having pit bull type heritage. Shelter staff collectively identified 62. One in five dogs whose DNA showed pit bull type heritage wasn’t identified as such by any member of staff while one in three dogs without DNA from the pit bull heritage breeds used in the study was labelled a pit bull type by at least one person.
Another study involving shelter workers in the UK & United States also found considerable variation in which dogs people identified as pit bulls. The same dog could be viewed differently depending on who was looking at them. Normally that might simply result in an incorrect breed description on an adoption page. But when a breed label carries legal consequences it becomes something much more serious.
There is another problem too.
Mixed breed dogs can have incredibly complicated ancestry. Research involving more than 900 shelter dogs found only a small percentage were genetically identified as purebred. When shelter staff attempted to identify those dogs by appearance their primary breed identification matched the most prevalent breed detected through DNA testing in only a little over half of the dogs at one shelter. Trying to identify several breeds within the same dog was even more difficult.
Which brings me back to the law. If we aren’t particularly good at determining the ancestry of mixed breed dogs by sight what happens when we attach serious legal consequences to somebody deciding what a dog looks like?
I think that’s one of the most important questions we can ask on Pit Bull Awareness Day. This doesn’t mean breed is completely irrelevant. Humans have selectively bred dogs for generations & genetics can influence physical characteristics & behavioural tendencies. But a tendency within a population isn’t an assessment of the behaviour of the individual dog standing in front of you.
A dog’s behaviour can be influenced by genetics, early experiences, socialisation, training, environment, health & the circumstances that dog has lived through. Yet breed specific legislation begins somewhere else. It begins with the category.
Here in Britain a dog suspected of being a prohibited type can be seized while an assessment is carried out. Whether that dog is considered a prohibited type can be based primarily on its physical characteristics rather than DNA or known parentage. That decision can change the dog’s entire future.
We should be able to question whether that makes sense without pretending public safety doesn’t matter. Owners have responsibilities & serious incidents involving dogs shouldn’t be dismissed because talking about risk makes us uncomfortable.
The question is whether breed specific legislation is the best way of identifying that risk. A dog looking a particular way isn’t the same thing as a dog presenting a particular danger.
More than three decades after breed specific legislation was introduced in Britain major animal welfare & veterinary organisations continue to question whether focusing on prohibited types has made the public safer. Organisations including the RSPCA, Dogs Trust, Battersea, Blue Cross & the British Veterinary Association have called for an approach which focuses much more heavily on prevention, responsible ownership & the behaviour of individual dogs.
Pit Bull Awareness Day doesn’t require us to pretend every pit bull is wonderful either. Dogs are individuals & treating them as individuals doesn’t mean ignoring risk. It means assessing the risk that actually exists.
That is why I think the conversation around pit bulls needs to move beyond whether we like them or whether they need better PR. There is a much more important question. Should a law intended to protect people attach potentially life changing consequences to a classification which can depend so heavily upon what somebody thinks a dog looks like? Because when appearance becomes a legal category getting it wrong isn’t a minor mistake. There is a dog at the end of that decision.
And sometimes that dog’s entire future depends on what somebody decides they see.