A Professional Dog Trainer Speaks
By Anonymous
Let me start with my background because what I say will be startling and unnerving to many people.
I am a retired professional dog trainer. I spent 26 years working with hundreds of dogs, including over 12 years managing a 300+ dog sled dog kennel. For three of those years, the kennel housed 75 pit bulls. I handled them daily, exercised, fed, and cared for them while their owner, a breeder, and kennel operator, was rebuilding a property that burned to the ground during a wildfire.
To say I have experience with this type of dog would be an understatement. I also ran teams of 22 sled dogs into the wildernesses of Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho, Utah, and Oregon. These are extremely powerful, high-prey drive dogs. I could command them and was confident and sure of myself around every kind of dog, with no exceptions. I feared no dog, understood them, respected them, and was confident working with them all.
That changed forever on a cool spring morning when I was walking my leashed small Yorkie mix, a trained service dog. We were walking on a military base where I lived. Pit bull-type dogs are not permitted on military bases. At about 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday, 30 yards from my home, a neighbor opened his door right after I had picked up a piece of trash and thrown it in the trash can. A 7-year-old pit bull mix exploded through it and went after my small dog. I knew its intent. I saw it latch onto my dog, and I fell on top of it.
More than 20 years of experience handling dogs made absolutely no difference. I know how to disable a dog. I know how to restrain one. I had stopped dog fights before, some involving more than 10 dogs in a mass of snarling biting fury and emerged with cuts and bruises.
But not that day. That day for several minutes, I screamed and fought with the pit bull mix. The man with the dog was not the owner. He was watching her for a friend. A “military” family who had listed the pit bull as a “lab mix” to get it onto the military base where they lived.
The man just watched while the dog tried three times to kill my dog. Each time I stopped the pit, she turned on me, attacking me, driving me back, then going after my dog again, who, after the first attack, was not moving anymore but was screaming in terror and agony.
I am haunted by every second of the attack. Every second I could not stop it and was powerless to protect my beloved pet and myself. Then, finally, the man stepped in, dragged the dog back into the apartment, locked it up, and returned outside.
I was lying over the top of my dog, covering him with my body, and terrified the monster that had attacked us would break out again. I recall the man giving me the number of the dog’s owner, asking me not to be mad, and leaving me bleeding and sobbing over my crying pet.
My sister drove my dog and me to the emergency vet and then to the hospital. She told me to fill out a dog attack form that the emergency vet gave us and encouraged me to go after the owner. Then she changed her mind.
My sister’s husband is also “military,” and she is so proud of being “military” it’s sometimes overwhelming. But when she learned a “military” family owned the pit bull, she demanded I drop everything. She told me my tears were stupid and unreasonable. That I was irrational and too emotional about what had happened. I, a professional dog trainer, was having nightmares and was afraid to step out my door.
I was not allowed to say a single negative thing to the family. Instead, I was treated like it was all my fault, as if I was wrong to show animal control the bites on my hands and legs, I was wrong to let them take pictures of my dog, and wrong to ask the family to pay his vet bills.
From that day on, my sister treated me as if I was a criminal, a stupid, foolish, wrong, and bad person because the family did get into trouble. They had not told the apartment management about the dog, had hidden the breed from the “military,” and if I didn’t shut up, I would ruin their happiness.
I could not sleep, had massive PTSD attacks that crippled me if a door opened suddenly, and could not work at my job training dogs because I was not “me” anymore. But my suffering didn’t matter. Saving that pit bull and its family mattered more to my sister than my dog and me.
My relationship with my sister became cold. I can’t trust her. She got a purebred pit bull puppy — while living on a military base knowing this breed is prohibited. Why? She wanted one of these poor, misunderstood dogs to show her support for pit bulls. She has lived on base with her pit bull and two other dogs for 3 years, hiding the pit bull whenever necessary.
In all of my years of handling these dogs, I never feared them, but I do now, not because of the dogs, really. They are what they are, but the people who love them. Their owners don’t care about anyone or anything but those dogs. They will throw their own family and friends under a bus to protect these pit bull-type dogs. It’s like some bizarre sickness overcomes them, and rational, realistic thought, compassion — anything human — vaporizes in them.
In my years as a trainer, I have seen a substantial number of pit bulls attack other animals — and their owners excuse it. I’ve seen pit bull owners covered in bandages forgive their dogs for the attacks that caused their injuries. I have seen good people, owners who loved their pit bulls and were afraid of what they were dealing with, but so desperate that their dog not be what they didn’t want it to be. Unfortunately, these people are blind to the warnings that their dog is careening toward a disaster.
Some of these dogs I’ve seen were just not “wired” right, either. They were wrong in the head, obsessed with killing things. Their loving owners would come in with scars or fresh injuries, their eyes bright with tears begging me to help them and not wanting to hear from another trainer that they needed to put the dog down. You cannot train away instinct. You cannot train away genetics — you cannot love it away, either.
I am a highly experienced dog trainer who has studied behavior, rehabilitation, and nutrition in dogs for decades. Unfortunately, this type of dog threatens safety wherever it lives. The owners cannot be relied on to know their dogs, handle or manage them, and keep others safe.
Pit bull-type dogs give little or no warning before attacking. They can be 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 years old, never harmed anything or made a growl in all those years, and still attack without warning. Pit bulls are wonderful, until the moment they are not. [Emphasis added.]
Nobody, not a professional, not an expert in the breed, not an owner, absolutely nobody, can look at a pit bull and tell which one will grow up to be okay and which will not. It is impossible to “raise them right.”
I’ve seen pit bulls raised every kind of “right way.” Then it turns and mauls someone or something. But, I have seen the other side too, dogs covered in fighting scars, missing chunks of their bodies, safer and easier to handle than a baby mouse, and well-behaved around other dogs.
In my professional opinion, no other kind of dog is less predictable, less reliable, or more dangerous than these pit bull-type dogs. And their owners’ irrational blind love for them adds to the danger.
Every shelter worker who labels a dog a “lab mix” instead of a pit bull because they want it to be adopted throws their community under the bus. Every owner who lies about what their dog is to get them into a rental, places everyone around them in front of a racing train. Every rescue organization that tries to “rehab” one that shows clear aggression and a clear willingness to cause injury to any living thing, is irresponsible, evil, and adding to the problem.
What I learned from this experience is frightening: absolutely nobody can trust anyone who owns a pit bull-type dog or loves this breed type. And nothing said by a pit bull owner who loves them can be taken as truth. Unfortunately, the lies seem to go with the dogs — they are coated in lies, pain, fear, and suffering.
As a dog trainer, I had to take tremendous criticism whenever I refused to handle these dogs. Their owners are the cruelest nastiest people I have ever encountered. Yet, their owners come begging a trainer for help so their dogs can play at dog parks or stop trying to kill cats or children. The owners become irate when someone says their dogs are not angels and they should expect nothing but what the dog does.
In training circles, one cannot say negative things about bully breeds. If you do, you are attacked, ostracized, labeled a failure, or “dog racist.” The crazed lovers of the pit bull type will do anything to ruin and discredit you.
I have observed how irrationally hateful the lovers of these dogs can be and how hard life is after a pit bull attack.
What scares me most about pit bulls, their owners, supporters, and the rescuers of that type of dog is an intentional blank out of reality. The terrible blindness, the refusal to admit what is happening right in front of them, to push away reality. Some are so determined that the dogs are not the problem, they do not realize that they cause more deaths and maulings. Or, maybe many do and just don’t care.
I wish the breed would vanish from this world. That would make it a better place. There are over 400 kinds of dogs, distinct breeds, and all but a handful are mostly safe to live with and be around. There is no valid reason to keep these deadly creatures. They were born for violence and death. There isn’t anything a pit bull does that another type of dog could not do better — except kill and ruin lives.
