"Jay Knepper" wrote in message
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snip

Several years after leaving CO for the Chicago suburbs, my adult daughter
was living with us and fell in love with a dog at a local humane society.
It was a pitt bull. Crunch time. I began a program to educate myself on
the breed. The library and the internet turned up a number of very
enlighening articles that made me open to the idea. The clincher was a
neighbor who owns a large, well known dog training school. She, an owner
of three golden retrievers, proclaimed that pit bulls were among her
favorite dogs, and make wonderful pets.

We adoped Mo. By the time my daughter moved out we decided that we could
not be without a dog. We now have two pit bulls. The first was bought from
a breeder and the second was rescued (a Chicago cop "took " her from a
drug dealer as a young puppy). Our dogs have been trained, loved, walked
daily, and in five years have never bitten any person, any other animal,
or our cats. We aren't unique in having great pit bulls. Most of them are
cherished family pets, and they have served our country in war, and have
been owned by individuals such as Helen Keller and Theodore Roosevelt.


We've been dog owners for a good number of years. Our first dogs were
Bernese Mountain Dogs, both of whom have sadly passed away, and now we
have a 14 month old Leonberger name Murphy. Our dogs go on three long
walks a day, at least one of which is usually a woods ramble or an
adventure to a dog park. Unfortunately we don't go to dog parks anymore
since our dogs have been attacked too many times, and I've gotten bitten
pulling other people's dogs off of mine. Our dogs have been attacked by
golden retrievers and akitas, but the biggest offenders have been german
shepherds, rottweilers and pit bulls.

A pit bull made the scariest attack. He charged Murphy from 100 yards
away and lunged for his throat. Luckily, the pit was wearing a muzzle.
Nonetheless, he keep lunging and doing what he could to get at Murphy.
The raging noises the pit bull made were unbelievable. During the
roughly 5 minutes that it took the owners to get a hold of their dog,
they spent the first minutes just watching, the muzzle almost slipped
off. If that had happened, Murphy would be dead, and then either I or
the pit bull would also have been no more. I could grab Murphy, but that
just made him a stationary target.

People with aggressive dogs should never put that dog in a situation
where he can harm anyone or any dog, and people who have dogs that were
historically bred for fighting have to be very careful even if their dog
hasn't shown any aggression. There are a great number of incidents were
a supposedly perfectly behaved pit bull, akita, mastiff... went berserk
and hurt or killed something. I'm not saying that people shouldn't own
these breeds, but if they do they should very pro-active dog owners with
significant experience in dog training, and they should be responsible
for what their dog does. In my experience, this is often not the case.

-Peter De Smidt