The bad thing about pit bulls…

…is that so many of them live with egomaniacal, stupid, violent, macho idiots.

This article really, really pissed me off. Because I know people like this. People who want to make their dogs violent, uncontrollable killers.

I used to live in a fairly pleasant working-class neighborhood in the North Bronx where every male from 12 onwards either seemed to have, or want to have, a pit bull. I saw many a teenaged boy get his first pit pup, and in polite park or street conversations, they’d brag about his lineage, his red nose (“they’re the craziest”). I had relatively similar one-sided conversations with men of all ages around there, many of whom had been raising pits for years.

At the local Vet’s office, nearly every dog person who came in had a tough dog and a little dog. A shih-tzu and a pit; a chihuahua and a rottie. One for the lap, and one to protect the lap, presumably. Of course, most people loved the tough dog and cuddled it just as much. Most people just liked dogs.

When I first got Sasha, he played happily with lots of these pits. I met many a sweet-natured pit bull. I knew some of them grew to be unmanageable, even as they were adorable pups. But others didn’t.

Over time, we’d encounter more and more nasty humans with nasty dogs, almost always pits. Their people would do things like threaten and bully other people out of the dog park, so their dog could be alone there. Or they’d instead encourage unwitting folks to let their dogs play with what turned out to be violent dogs. A breach of dog park rules, let alone human decency.

One woman seemed to have a nice pair of pits, and my dog played happily with them, until one of them nipped the other a bit too enthusiastically, and he bled. The scent of blood on her brother seemed to make her crazy. She lunged and angrily barked at him, as I hastily got my dog out. I was horrified. The owner did not seem to see a problem with her actions. But me and my lot hightailed out of there, as she tried to control her dogs on their leashes, one dripping with blood.

I learned to avoid the tough owners and their tough dogs, and my dog learned to fear and hate pits.

Still, the dog park was mostly decent, and 95% of people and their dogs were the salt of the earth.

Then one day I was with a spanish-speaking South American friend I’d met there and her mutt, who understood commands only in German: “Sitz, Mackie!”

They had lived in Austria previously, with her German-speaking partner, which explained the dog’s linguistic orientation. To this day, my own dog responds to Sitz!, the word of German he learned by watching Mackie.

My dog is bilingual in one word.

I am sure she must have given him a treat when she told him to sitz. Heck, if I brought enough treats, he’d probably take classes at the Goethe Institute.

And you have to love a mutt named after “Mackie Messer,” Mack the Knife from the Threepenny Opera. But I digress.

Anyway, the worst incident was when this friend and I arrived to find an eerily-realistic human form hanging from a tree in the dog run. A bundle of rags for a head, a shirt, pair of pants, pair of shoes, all stuffed, hanging 4-5 feet off the ground from a rope noose. As we approached, we only gradually came to see that someone had not actually hung themselves in the dog park. A nice guy we knew and had often walked and talked with came along soon after and we reported it to the cops patrolling the park. It was taken down.

The hanging dummy meant that they’d been training pits to attack human bodies, right there in the dog park. I did not go there much after that.

Incidentally, this was before 9/11. I never saw the nice guy again, and did not know his last name. (If there’s one thing having a dog does for you, it’s that you meet and talk to an awful lot more people in your neighborhood, people you usually never really get to know.) I knew he worked somewhere in lower Manhattan, perhaps even the WTC, and because of this, I will always, always worry about him. I hope he just moved away.

That’s one of the legacies of 9/11 for me: wondering about people you didn’t run into after that. Wondering if anyone you knew, but did not know well enough to check on, was lost.