Pit Bulls Unleashed: My dissection (part 1)
So, I said I was going to tear this documentary apart, and now I’ve finally got the time to do it. I quit watching after less than 15 minutes the first time because I thought “I need to make a review and write it as I watch”. So here you go.
(After a while I realized I would have to split it into several parts, because it’s already getting too long and no one would read any longer than this.)
Disclaimer about sensitivity: This film deals with the very real tragedy of a child being violently killed, and the trauma the babysitter suffered. I in no way wish to be disrespectful to this. I am not a parent myself, I have no idea what it’s like to lose a child, let alone in such a brutal way, and I have never been present for a brutal attack or death. That however, does not mean people in shock and grief know what they are talking about, and if I hear them saying false, misleading or ridiculous things, I will correct it, but that is all in the interest of getting to honesty and truth, not dancing on a poor child’s grave or their grief. So I don’t need comments telling me how insensitive I am.
The film opens with a real emergency call of a woman screaming about two pit bulls attacking a child, cuts to footage with blood in the snow, then cuts to the same woman saying to the camera that she would “never have imagined in a million years that my dog - my PET - would attack me, and kill a child”.
It cuts to the child’s father graphically describing the sight of his son after the attack, with a picture of the toddler before it happened.
Overall, with the choice of clips and music, I get a very “modern sensationalist drama-docu feel”, similar to Blackfish and Fatal Attractions.
The first scene depicts about 30 dogs (a dozen of which being “pit bull type dogs”) from a shelter in California being welcomed in Calgary. The organizer of this move explains they are taking in dogs on “death row”, that no one has so far shown interest in adopting, and if they didn’t take them, the dogs would be dead. (Then the narrator says these airlifts are done by an “animal rights group” - I think he’s a bit confused about what that term means.)
It cuts to a promotion video showing the pit bull as a perfect family pet, as well as celebrities owning and promoting pit bulls, including Cesar Millan explaining how he raised his kids around pit bulls, and that he hasn’t had a negative story with them.
It then cuts back to the woman in the intro, Susan, saying she used to watch Dog Whisperer before getting “the puppies”, and that the show and number of celebrities getting pit bulls was important in convincing her that the dogs were safe.
This is warning sign number #1 to me. They thought the breed must be fine, because “X celebrity has them”. I’ve watched most Dog Whisperer episodes, and in every single one it says “don’t try this at home”, but I also know how much the average Joe doesn’t understand at all what’s going on in the show, and so they think they can deal with a dog and be more likely to end up being Mr Millan 2, than one of the horrible cases he deals with (and typically, the cases he works with did watch his show, they just didn’t get the message at all or misinterpreted it horribly).
I may be reading too much into it, but it feels like she’s blaming Cesar for her failure. Meanwhile, he has a vast pack of dogs, maybe half of them pit bulls, often with bad stories, and they never attack each other or a human. He said the breed is fine, he never said every single person can own them. He even lists them among what he calls the “powerful breeds” frequently.
It then cuts to big warning sign #2 for me, as the narrators say how Susan and her boyfriend “adopted two puppies” crossed between pit bull and staffordshire terrier. I couldn’t believe it when I first watched and I hope it’s taken out of context, because it shows puppies maybe 3, 4 weeks old in her arms, and being fed milk in a bowl.
Again, I hope this is out of context and it doesn’t mean that a person with perhaps no dog experience took in these young puppies without a mother, but what’s certain is they took two littermates (or puppies the same age), and raised them together.
That is a horrible idea, as everyone with dog experience knows. You never buy two puppies at once, because you can’t influence them as well as if you had them one-on-one, or only with older dogs. And if she really did take them at barely a month old, that is another huge alarm bell going off.
An animal taken prematurely from its mother will not be as mentally sound as if it had a mother. A human can never do the job as well as a mother of their own species. Let alone a human that perhaps never owned dogs before.
I’m already not surprised it went the way it did. And of course she’ll blame the dogs.
She goes on about how the dogs were trained, socialized with other dogs, how friends’ kids would come over, and that the dogs were loved. I don’t doubt this at all. But this is the common error people make - they think that in order for a dog to attack, they must be abused. So in her mind (perhaps), if the dogs weren’t abused, and they did attack, it must be the breed’s fault.
This is entirely false. All it takes is an owner who misunderstands and disrespects the animal’s nature, and with her ignorance displayed so far, that’s pretty obvious to me.
She sounds exasperated at the fact that the dogs were cuddling with her in her bed “that morning”, and it again cuts to the image of the toddler boy, Dax.
The narrator explains how, on the morning of March 6th, 2013, Susan was babysitting Dax as she had many times before, and it cuts to his dad, Jeff, describing his boy. The narrator then explains how that morning, Susan let the dogs out while holding Dax, and that within seconds, the dogs went “from pets to predators”.
“They just kept coming at us, and Dax… they pulled him out of my arms, and…“
I wasn’t there, no one but her was there, to my knowledge there is no footage of the event, but what I can guess at is that the two dogs - brought up together as puppies by an inexperienced owner, perhaps allowed to jump and lick and play very “rambuctiously”, because she thought they were “perfectly safe” (no dog is “perfectly safe”, unless it’s a 15 year old Chihuahua with no teeth), were running around, playing, engaging in normal predator-play fight behavior between each other.
Then they went over to Susan and Dax, and started jumping on her in a “playful” manner, and she held Dax back (again, this is all speculation), something people almost always do when holding a child and dogs interfere.
What happens then is as you move the child (same if you’re holding an object, like food), it becomes a target. As it moves away, the dogs want to follow, and have it more. Then the two of them would have been jumping on her, still in predator-play/fight mode, and it switched very quickly from play to reality, to adult predator mode.
I said it the other day in the other post, I’ll say it again, because people need to get it - dogs are not rational.
DOGS. ARE. NOT. FURRY. HUMANS.
In 2012, a case happened in Sweden that could have led to a death, but didn’t. Two Alaskan malamutes were out running in the forest, far away from their (irresponsible) owner. The dogs came upon a few women riding horses, and so chased the horses (prey animal). The horses bolted, and eventually, one of the riders jumped off as she could not control her horse, and the dogs proceeded to savage her.
She survived, but both dogs were killed. The owner faced no charges. Of course. It’s what always often happens. I was enormously frustrated at this, becuase most likely, there was nothing wrong with the dogs. Nothing at all.
They were just predators (malamutes have this stronger than many other breeds, and they are very large and powerful, but all dogs have it to some extent) running together in the forest (pack behavior, egging each other on to a state neither dog could have been on their own), they found large prey animals, they chased the prey animals, all these hormones would be coursing through their systems, preparing them for “the kill”, and then a human fell to the ground.
At that point, all rationality, all the years they’ve spent being loved by humans and perhaps never showing aggression even once, go out the window. The human is now just a piece of meat on the ground, a prey that has fallen. The dogs might have been completely normal, they just ended up in the wrong situation, because of a stupid, reckless owner, who went unpunished and could then go and just buy another two large, powerful dogs and set them loose in the forest and the same thing would happen again.
(Also in Sweden at the time, debates emerged about “Is the Alaskan malamute a dangerous breed?” Because apparently, there are “dangerous breeds”, and there are “safe breeds“, but that’s for later.)
Fredrik Steen, Sweden’s #1 “dog expert” said the following (translated by me): “We [in Sweden] romanticize dogs way too much. We forget that we’re dealing with predators, we don’t understand that basically all dogs are fully capable of doing this.”
It cuts back to the original emergency call, with Susan screaming hysterically and crying for an ambulance.
Jeff explains how he was notified that Dax had been "bitten” and was taken to the hospital, and he thought “it’s a dog bite, I was bitten by dogs before, how bad could it be?”
He describes that as he arrived at the hospital, he saw Dax being given CPR, and how his face was “just gone, from here - down, was just mangled”, and “there was blood everywhere”. The doctors could not save him.
I am making my own records from the list of “fatal dog attacks in the United States” on Wikipedia, and by March 6th, 2013, I find this, with more details of the attack than in the film:
When babysitter, baby in her arms she went out into her backyard let her two 45 lb. , they became “nippy”, jumping up at the pair, so she batted them off. The dogs then attacked, and bit & scratched her, shredding her clothing and knocking her down, causing the boy to hit the ground, whereupon the dogs attacked him. The babysitter tried unsuccessfully to stop the attack, and redirect the dogs’ attack onto her.
So I was right in my speculation that the dogs started by jumping and switched from previous play behavior to predatory behavior.
A neighbor heard screams but did nothing as he thought it was kids having a snowfight. She got the child away from the dogs and called 911 but left the baby unattended & totally naked on a cold hardwood floor. The boy was taken by ambulance to the hospital, and by helicopter from the hospital to a medical center later that day, where he was pronounced dead of dog attack. Before the attack, the veterinarian center where they had been spayed, neutered, and otherwise cared for had not seen them as dangerous, but one was described as “standoffish” while at the facility. The owner said she had got the three-year-old dogs as puppies and that they had never shown signs of aggression. After the attack, the dogs were euthanized and tested negative for rabies, and the authorities decided not to press charges against the babysitter.
They decided it was not her fault at all, while I often see these cases (again, in the list of cases in America) ending up charging the owners for “criminally negligent manslaughter” or similar things.
She went off completely free, despite it being her dogs, her responsibility, and she put the child in this situation. Maybe the dogs needed to be killed, I don’t know, but I think it’s a disgusting tendency (also seen in said list), where dogs are killed immediately, with no evaluation, but the owner goes free without any charges.
And as for what the film does, this is a very common tactic. A film brings up a highly emotional, devastating anecdote, and tries to use it as their #1 argument. And the thing is that it works, because humans are emotional beings. We’re not as irrational as dogs, but we’re still mainly guided by emotion.
If the film instead had said “in the years 2000-2015, X number of children were killed by pit bulls”, it wouldn’t at all have had the same effect as this one case did, showing it in such detail, talking about the boy’s personality and showing his pictures and footage. Documentaries on pit bull and “dangerous dogs” almost always do this.
While of course the long list of cases where labs and huskies (or other “non-controversial” breeds) kill children, are completely irrelevant. If they had made a documentary about “killer labs”, and brought up one of these cases in the same way, it probably wouldn’t have had the same effect, because the cultural narrative is that “pit bull = baby eating devil dog”.
The film explains the same thing, how Susan was found “not to be at fault”, and Jeff goes on to say how she didn’t do anything wrong, because “she didn’t abuse ‘em, the dogs were in good health”. This again. I’m finding it very difficult to be respectful right now, because grief doesn’t excuse you saying ridiculous, damaging things on TV.
I’ll repeat myself: You do not need to abuse, starve, beat or train a dog to fight in order for it to attack someone. Doesn’t matter if it’s a pit bull or another breed. All it takes is an owner disrespecting the predatory nature of dogs and being the type of person who would say “I would never in a million years have imagined this!”
If you say that, you are the problem, not the dog. However, pit bulls are large, powerful terriers with a very intact killing instinct towards other animals, and it makes it even more important that they aren’t placed with these idiot owners who think dogs are just living teddy bears/furbabies.
“They were good-natured dogs until the day they weren’t” Jeff says - spoken as a true ignorant person who doesn’t understand animal behavior.
Susan then says “Who wants to admit for even a second that their family pet could kill one of their family members?”
^ See this guy? This is my dog. Eight and a half year old Mallorcan bulldog, distant cousin to other bulldogs and mastiffs. People who see him would think he’s a pit x rottie mix. He’s bigger than a retriever, and a very serious guard dog. I raised him from a puppy, my first own puppy.
I trained bite inhibition with him from the start. He never bit a human in aggression, in fact after about 10-12 months of age, he never bit me even in play, unless I simply got in the way when he was chewing a stick or something. My mistake, not his. He knows not to ever bite people.
I trust him with my life, as a highly loyal guard dog, who loves us and takes his job very seriously. Does that mean I think he’s a “human”, my “furbaby” and that he could never act irrationally, or out of character? Absolutely not.
When he was living with my man and his family for a while, my sister-in-law had a baby. I told my man to not let Wikus (the dog) in the room with the baby for any reason. I don’t mean “unsupervised”, I mean at all.
He was six years old then, never showed aggression to a child in his life, in fact he lets neighborhood kids hug and pet him, under my strict supervision, and has been around my sister’s young kids, just calmly ignoring them. I trust him with me. I didn’t trust the people he was with, including my dear man, to read him right and be able to predict the situation. Wikus was fine with kids, but he had never seen a baby before, and I wasn’t there to judge the situation. (Also, Wikus was not himself while living there and started attacking cats, after years of being completely fine with cats when with me.)
I’m not going to be so stupid as to think “he’s a nice dog!” and leave it at that. Or feel a need to “prove” how “sweet” he is and let him nuzzle the baby.
So what do I do, briefly, do make sure my dog doesn’t hurt anyone?
It sounds nebulous and abstract, but I “respect him as a dog”. I realize he’s a 70 pound case of muscles and teeth, and could do terrible damage in the right (wrong) circumstances. I realize he has strong protective instincts of the pack and territory, and though he has never shown predatory behavior, he still has the wild dog or wolf inside, buried very deep down.
I obedience- and recall-train. I only have him loose when other people and dogs aren’t around.
If I thought he was dangerous, as a dog that might actually go after another animal or person (and you need to know this about your dog), I wouldn’t have him loose in an unfenced area at all. (This might sound confusing. If I thought he had a 1% chance of attacking someone, I wouldn’t have him off leash. I don’t think there’s a 0.1% chance even, but it still exists in all dogs. Not all dogs are equally dangerous, but the risk is never exactly zero.)
I made sure to socialize him with kids as a puppy, but in later years I’ve sometimes said no to kids asking to pet him, because while I can account for my dog, I can’t account for their behavior, and kids often don’t listen.
I do play tug-o-war with him, especially when he was younger, but it was always strictly structured and I needed him to have an “off-button”. As soon as I say stop, he stops, as soon as I tell him to let go (of the rope or stick), he lets go. If he has an object he wants (anything), he drops it when I ask him to.
Structure the walk. People let their dogs leave the house when over-excited, and that’s the mindset that sets up the rest of the walk.
Build a working relationship with the dog, beyond “he’s my baby and I luv him and he’s so sweet and would never hurt a living soul”, because you don’t know that.
Susan continues; “Who wants to for a single second think that that’s possible? Think that that could be a reality? I know I certainly didn’t. I never would have imagined in a million years before this that my dog, my pet, would attack me, and kill a child.”
I hate to say it, but she is exactly what is wrong with this breed. People who are this ignorant, this naive, and this careless. And then either they or other people go on to blame the breed.
Years ago on a dog forum, I saw someone say, and this may seem ridiculous to some, but I like it: “Better to think you have a lion on the leash and act accordingly, than to think you have a lamb.”
That is exactly what a lot of dog owners think, perhaps especially pit bull owners. They need to prove to the world that their dog is actually a lamb, and when this woman failed, she blamed the breed, she blamed people like Cesar Millan for speaking highly of the breed, she blamed everyone but herself, because it couldn’t possibly be her mistake!
I often hear the same from people campaigning against exotic pets. They’re a failed owner, and so the animal must be banned. “If I couldn’t do it, and I’m so awesome, then obviously everyone must be at least as crap as I was!”
Extremely arrogant and naive.
Listen, mistakes happen. Sometimes tragic, fatal mistakes. I don’t want hate on her, I don’t want her thrown in jail, but I want her and others like her to take some responsibility. Because if they refuse to admit their own mistake, they are doomed to repeat it.
You can never make sure something like this attack never happens again, you can’t insure the world against mistakes and human error, but you can take actions to prevent a lot of them. And the first part of that is educating yourself.
Don’t be like these people.
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