Pit bull fans accuse me of barking up the wrong tree (2024)

Anybody who writes a newspaper column gets used to angry emails. It comes with the territory, as people say. And why not? If you write provocatively, you shouldn’t object when people are provoked. Often enough, you learn things about the mindset of certain kinds of readers.

Every time this column lampoons Donald Trump, for example, I get a deluge of personal attacks questioning my motives, my intelligence and/or my patriotism. What I don’t get, not from Trumpers, not ever (not never one time, as my friend George, the county cow-whisperer, liked to say), is anybody questioning my factual accuracy.

You’d think there might be somebody, somewhere, who believes Trump’s story about the helicopter crash with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown supposedly bad-mouthing Kamala Harris. But there doesn’t appear to be anybody willing to say so.

They get furious that anybody’s allowed to mock Trump in the newspaper, even when they know perfectly well that he’s either made up — or worse, imagined — a hurtful story about his opponent.

But Trumpers, in my experience, have nothing on the pit bull cult, devotees of a dangerous breed of dog that is too often in the news — usually because of unprovoked attacks on people and their pets that are often fatal. Pick a city, any city, if you doubt me. Google the city’s name and “pit bull attacks” or some such phrase.

Two recent Chicago headlines, for example: “Woman attacked, killed by family dog, police say” and “71-year-old man mauled to death by 7 dogs while walking to store.” Just this week, a man breeding pits in a Chicago apartment was killed by his own dogs.

Nevertheless, even the mildest criticism of the breed brings bitter responses. Recently, this column briefly described an attack on my dog Aspen at a dog park in Little Rock. “Don’t get me started about pit bulls,” I wrote. “They’re actually illegal in the city dog park, and they should be.”

This observation provoked a torrent of personal abuse. One fellow accused me of being a “dog racist,” a phrase that appeared in several messages. Like a fool, I engaged, pointing out that dog breeds are not races; indeed, the terms are near opposites. A breed is something artificially created by human intervention.

Pit bulls were deliberately bred to fight, and alas, too many of them do. There’s a columnist in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette who chronicled an unprovoked attack upon his wife and her toy dog, Benji. She got badly injured saving her little pet’s life. Challenged by pit aficionados, he asked readers to tell their own stories. He’s gotten several vivid columns out of it.

There’s a reason why the breed is banished from the city dog park — not that pit owners are particularly observant of the law. And honestly, most of the animals behave decently most of the time. But there are enough exceptions to make the statute very handy as needed.

Police can make them leave.

It’s also good to have capable individuals like my friend Patrick around. Patrick made a pit let go of his Labrador, Hurley, by inserting two fingers into the dog’s rectum and squeezing hard — a trick he’d read about online. Even so, Hurley needed surgery. I know that dog well. He’d never been in a fight before or since.

Neither had my dog Aspen, half Great Pyrenees, half husky, a playful fellow and a friend to all. But Hurley and Aspen had spent many happy hours play-fighting, which gave him the know-how when the pit — a stray dumped at the park — attacked him out of nowhere.

Patrick helped pull them apart. The pit was taken to a vet for stitches, and then to the city shelter.

Truthfully, it’s not just the breed, but the people who own them. Some are simply oblivious to the animals’ nature, like indulgent parents and their children. It’s always the other dog’s fault. One of my angry emailers confided that she doesn’t take her “pitties” to the park because when there’s a fight, people always blame them.

She blames other dogs’ “body language.”

In five years of daily dog park visits, every serious fight I’ve seen has involved pits. Partly that’s because too many pit owners are simply jerks. It’s the aggression they like. Makes them feel tough.

Get a load of this guy, for example: “I understand you are old, crusty and have over one and three quarters of your feet in the grave, but that is no excuse to be mean and just be a dog racist.”

Dead or alive, I’ve come to the view that keeping pit bulls at all is mildly antisocial and potentially criminal if proper precautions aren’t observed. You can’t take proper precautions if you’re in denial about the animals’ true nature.

I know oddballs who keep venomous snakes as pets, but they don’t kid themselves about what they are.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com

Get Opinions content delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.