No Kill – Page 5 – Animal Welfare Movement

The first pitbull arrived in my city in the mid 1980’s. The owner wanted to have a breed with a reputation; this dog did not live up to that reputation’ it was a very friendly dog. The original desire to own a pitbull was for owners to claim that their dog was the meanest on the block. For that reason, breeders began breeding dangerous characteristics into the breed. Clearly, the breed was attracted to the worst pet owners.

Since bad pet owners do not believe in sterilizing their pets, pitbulls have become the most dominant breed in animal shelters. This has created a difficult time for shelters trying to become no-kill; to maintain their adoption numbers with their shelter intakes being 50% pitbulls.

Pitbulls are not necessarily a bad breed, they just require an unusually responsible pet owner. As pet owners have become increasingly lazy, finding a good owner for a pitbull is problematic. It is not a breed that you can just take to the dog park and turn loose; as with any powerful breed they require constant oversight.

Incidents of dog bites is proof of poor pet ownership. Foolish pet owners fail to realize the bite potential of their pet. There is a growing group that will try to tell unsuspecting potential adopters that the pitbull is no different than any other breed. This is a false narrative. Although pitbulls are one of the most loyal breeds, the breed has genetic traits towards aggression. The aggressive traits can be controlled, but require a watchful pet owner. Most acts of aggression by pitbulls are the result of the owner being too lazy to accept their responsibility for keeping the breed.

Due to the unpredictability of the breed and the bad owners that were attacked to the breed, many communities decided to protect themselves by banning the breed. Pitbull owners were eventually able to circumvent the ban by identifying their pitbulls as a service animals. Due to the abuse by reckless owners, many airlines stopped permitting “emotional support animals” in the passenger section of the airplane unless the animal is “professionally certified.” This brought a new internet business of pet owners being able to obtain fake certifications.

There has been a great effort to turn people’s attitudes away from seeing the pitbull breed as a potentially dangerous breed. The problem that this breed faces is that they belong to owners who fail to accept the dog’s potential to do harm. We continue to see incidents of people injured by the breed and it all due to the stupidity of the dog’s owner.

I appreciate seeing news reports of pet owners being charged with reckless endangerment when their dogs have repeatedly bitten people. I hate to see animals destroyed for the stupidity of their owners, but euthanizing an aggressive dog is the only way to protect the community from an ignorant pet owner. Unfortunately, we have far too many of them in our communities.

I am so grateful that most of my career was prior to social media. Social media has created such a mean spirited group of people online. It is most frequently used to bully others. In the animal welfare arena, social media is used to bully shelter staff into making questionable animals available for adoption. The no-kill movement used this bullying tactic to facilitate high adoption numbers.

In recently years, I discovered that shelter staff has become more concerned about having a positive social media presence, than to do their job to protect the community. The constant pressure that is placed on shelter staff is forcing extremely foolish decisions.

Adoption councilors are becoming more and more like used car salesman, asking potential pet owners to purchase an animal without looking under the hood. We are entering an era in which shelters are being sued for misrepresenting the aggressive backgrounds of dogs in their care; just so that animal shelter staff can be praised on social media.