Sounds like you had a really nasty experience. I'm not sure why someone
whose dog had to be muzzled would take it to a dog park, let alone let it
run. The owner is an idiot, and it sounds like the dog might be a real
threat. But note that we remember and discuss the breed, not the owners.
That's always the way it is.

I was walking in a dog park with a husband and wife their dog, and my dogs a
few years ago. The wife was chatty but the husband was rather quiet. At one
point she told me that her husband "had a thing" about pit bulls. I asked
him about it, and he said he was OK with my dogs, but he his forearm had
been seriously injured when his neighbour's dog attacked him. It turns out
that the neighbour had trained the dog by having it hang by its teeth from a
suspended 2x4, while beating it with a wire coat hanger. Otherwise it was
kept isolated outside on a short chain. The chain trick alone tends to make
dogs agressive toward people.

Dave Mundt has posted a URL later in this thread that gives a fair picture
of the breed and its characteristics,
http://www.rescueeverydog.org/pitbull_breed.html. I hope that a few others
in the group take a look at it, or will do their own research. Some of the
salient points of the URL are that pitt bulls were originally bred to be
VERY people friendly, but agressive to other animals. I'm sure that there
are breeders that still work for dog-agressive qualites because I understand
that dog fights are remain popular in some parts of the country. What I
hate is painting all of these animals with the same brush.

Jay



"Peter De Smidt" pdesmidt*no*spam*@tds.*net* wrote in message
...



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