When there were only a few pit bulls, owned only by people who fought them or used them for crime, there was little danger to the public. It is when pit bulls went mainstream that the fatality figures started to mount.
Pit bulls are from 35 - 80 lbs, but most are around 50 lbs. An adult has some hope of not being killed by an attacking pit bull. Anyone person under 100 lbs has no chance if the pit bull intends to kill and once they start, they seldom willingly stop. Nevertheless, we don't want everyone of them killed, some are perfectly safe. We want the breed phased out, because there is no rational reason for a civilized society to allow dogs that are bred to attack and fight to the death.
Dogs such as Cane corsos, Argentine dogos, Presna canarios, Bull mastiffs, especially when crossed with Pit bulls will be able to kill any adult.
Society should have banned all fighting breeds of dogs long ago. It is too late for hundreds of people, mostly little children who died slowly, having their scalps, and faces, and limbs torn off. We can think of only one death worse than that for children, and that is at the hands of a sexual predator.
Any society that does not prevent its children from being killed by dogs bred deliberately to be dangerous, is a sick society.
Defenders of these breeds of dogs accuse AAS of being anti-dog. We are anti-dangerous breeds of dogs, not of individual dogs. For the love of dogs, we don't want so many of them to live short, brutish lives, to be killed by pounds after they have destroyed, or tried to destroy, a human life. We don't want them to be chained, isolated, lonely, depressed, angry, crated, penned or muzzled. We don't want to hear anymore stories of young males picking up their Pit bull by its chain and slamming it into a wall to make it "dangerous". We don't want to have to go photograph a poor Pit bull, chained in yard, and know that we can't rescue it because it might be highly dangerous. We don't want to be told anymore about the fights held on reserves and how the bloody bodies of the users are left to die or thrown in the river. For the love of dogs, we want this abuse to stop.
For the love of children, we want children to be safe from fatal attacks.
We simply cannot comprehend how anyone who loves dogs could defend the breeding of more of these dogs, so many of which are being killed by pounds and abused so horribly.
Judy Stone, President, AAS
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