Pit bulls used to be America’s favorite dog
Now they’re the breed we fear most
In 1921, director and film producer Hal Roach was staring absent-mindedly out of his office window, when he noticed a group of children playing in the lumber yard across the street. A perfectly-kempt little girl had just auditioned for a part with a well rehearsed song and dance routine, but he had found her act predictable and dull. But the children in the lumber yard — that was real childhood. He wanted to make a series of shows about them and their pets. For the pet, the choice was obvious. The children would have a pit bull. Before pit bulls were synonymous with dogfighting, they were the people’s dog.
The show Our Gang was the precursor to the wildly popular Little Rascals, and the pit bull, Pete, would become one of the most famous dogs of all time. In Our Gang, he hung out with the kids on stoops, slept tucked under the covers with them at night, and hid their toy guns out of apparent concern for their safety. But more than just a loveable canine celebrity, he would become the embodiment of the American public’s mercurial tendencies. One day, the pit bull was the symbol of our hearty and unpretentious country, only to be transformed in a few decades into the menace of the American imagination. The pit bull’s fall from grace was driven by a deeply entrenched belief that dogs, just like people, can be grouped into races that are inherently violent.
As Bronwen Dickey explains in her book Pit Bull, “The term ‘pit bull” is an elastic, imprecise, and subjective phrase.” According to official kennel standards this includes the American pit bull terrier, the American Staffordshire terrier, the Staffordshire bull terrier, and the American bully. By this definition the dogs can weigh anywhere from twenty five to one hundred pounds. Over the years, they have been known by dozens of names, but the term has also come to include mixed breed dogs with particular traits such as a blocky head. As Dickey writes, “those same characteristics can be found in more than twenty breeds of dog, and the latest genetic research indicates that many mixed-breed dogs identified as “pit mixes” actually aren’t.” Pit bulls as we know them have become “a slap-dash shorthand for a general shape of dog — a medium-sized smooth-coated mutt.” In short, a pit bull could be any dog.
The turn of the 20th century was the pit bull’s reputational heydey. States wanted to use them in campaigns “because they were thought to be so friendly and appealing to the ‘average Joe’…. plucky, unfussy sidekicks,” Dickey writes. They were mascots during World War I. Helen Keller, who called her pit mix “the lord of my affection,” Dr. Seuss, and Jimmy Carter were all proud pit bull owners.
Pete was owned by Harry Lucenay, a former heavyweight wrestler turned dog trainer. Pete’s father, Pal, also owned by Lucenay, appeared in 224 films — more than any human or dog actor of that era. Lucenay, a showman known for dramatic flourishes, would report finding Pal curled beside his dead mother, a dispatch carrier, in a barn near Bordeaux after WWI. Both Pete and Pal were impeccably trained. Lucenay would attend all their filmings, giving orders offscreen. But once film transitioned from silent to sound, Lucenay had to create complex hand signals to tell the dogs when to lay down, put their heads between their feet, or on their left paws. Pete would eventually earn Lucenay $21,000 a year, and have a personal valet to bathe him, pluck his eyebrows, and trim his nails daily. Pete was instantly recognizable by the large ring around his eye. Lucenay’s son would later claim the ring was real, while Dickey writes that it was dyed on.
But the image that Pete and Pal fostered has been overshadowed by another narrative — that of the vicious, lunging pit bull. So which is true? Since the 1800s, some pit bulls were indeed bred for bull baiting and dogfighting. Other pit bulls were bred for the qualities that Pete and Pal had: friendliness, loyalty, and alertness to instruction. Further complicating the picture, as the ASPCA explains, is the fact that fighting dogs were not bred for aggression towards humans, since they needed to be handled by humans. Dogs that couldn’t be were culled. Of the dogs who were bred for dogfighting, as Dickey explains, only one dog in a litter may show the dogfighting temperament. But “breeding” isn’t a perfect science. The result: Some pit bulls are dangerous. Some pit bulls are not, just as dogs of other breeds are sometimes dangerous and sometimes not.
The most interesting lesson to be drawn from the pit bull’s history is about people, not dogs. The American aboutface on the pit bull reveals us as mercurial creatures, easily swept up in moral panic. There were highly publicized instances of pit bulls attacking people in Pete and Pal’s day too: A famous breeder was embroiled in scandal when one of his dogs killed his two-year-old nephew, but Pete and Pal remained the dominant pit bull narrative. At the height of American dog fighting, our moral outrage was focused on other breeds: the bloodhound and the spitz — a small lap dog purported to be a particularly potent vessel for rabies.
The thing is, it’s easier to group threats into broad types. Our blanket association of the pit bull with menace in many ways just represents a resistance to ambiguity, a hunger for simple truths.
