Thread by @ashtonpittman

THREAD: Someone dared @ me saying to "get rid of" our pit bulls (Dorothy & Dru, below) because they "kill children."

Let's set the record straight. The idea that pitbulls are some sort of superpredator dog breed is a myth.

And it's a myth borne from anti-Black racism racism. 1/

"When people talk about pit bulls, they often reveal their opinions on class and race issues while 'using the dogs as proxies,' Bronwen Dickey said. Recent pit history, she argues in her book, is partly a story about racism & cultural stereotypes." 2/
fusion.tv/story/302877/p…

In the early 20th century & through the 1960s, pitbulls had a reputation as a loving, all American dog.

Teddy Roosevelt had pit bulls in the White House.

Helen Keller had a beloved pitbull.

The most famous dog in the country was Petey on the Little Rascals—a pit bull. 3/

But that all changed: "As urban crime skyrocketed in the 70s, pit bulls became increasingly employed as guard dogs in economically depressed Black & brown neighborhoods...Newspapers began printing bogus stories, fabricating reports of vicious behavior." 4/ splinternews.com/the-racist-sto…

As panicky, false stories about Black crime spread across America in the 70s (as white America reeled over 60s civil rights advancements), so did ones about pits.

"Reports all but linked pit bulls to the crack epidemic that was sweeping inner cities & scaring white people." 5/

Dickey points out that you can even see using Ngram viewer that mentions of "pit bulls" began to rise dramatically at about the same time as mentions of "crack cocaine" shot up.

Pits were used as a proxy for all the fears about "inner cities" consuming white flight America. 6/

Bigotry against dogs as a proxy for racism isn't new in America, Dickey writes:

"Over the course of history, the dogs most often portrayed as ‘dangerous’ and subjected to the highest penalties have belonged to people with the least political power." 7/ nathanwinograd.com/the-ugly-racis…

Dickey: "In antebellum America, the least powerful were African slaves. Among the planter class, it was accepted as a foregone conclusion that dogs owned by slaves were most likely to attack sheep and cause general mayhem around the estate." 8/ nathanwinograd.com/the-ugly-racis…

Dickey writes: ‘It is not for any good purpose Negros raise, or keep dogs, but to aid them in the night robberies, George Washington wrote to a friend in 1790.

Any of Washington’s slaves who was found with a dog was severely whipped, the dog hanged. 9/ nathanwinograd.com/the-ugly-racis…

Newspapers still run stories about "pitbull" attacks because they get a lot of attention (but ignore other dog breed attacks). Analyses before have found that these stories identified dozens of non-pitbull breeds as pitbulls. 10/ nathanwinograd.com/the-ugly-racis…

Cities that have banned pit bulls, often euthanizing hundreds and thousands of innocent dogs, have not seen a reduction in dog bites. In many cases, incidents of dog bites actually rose after pit bull bans. Because the pitbull super predator myth is a myth. 11/

All of these myths about pitbulls have heartbreaking consequences:
-For every 100 pit bulls surrendered to a shelter, 7 survive
-For homeless pits, their fate is almost always death
-Of the total breed population, only 1 of every 600 pit bulls born ever gets a loving home 12/

Educate yourself. Don't repeat pit bull myths. Like so much in America, our ideas about pit bulls are a product of anti-Black racism: realpitbull.com/files/Demonizi…

Our two pit bulls are the sweet, most loving, cuddly dogs I've ever met. Please, if you can, adopt a pit. 13/

Reader's Digest also published a list of pit bull myths and refuted them. You've probably heard of many of these: rd.com/article/pit-bu…

Toronto passed a pit bull ban in 2005, with then-AG Michael Bennett telling legislators it would "mean fewer pit bull attacks and, overall, fewer attacks by dangerous dogs."

The result? A big drop in the pitbull population, but more dog attacks than ever. globalnews.ca/news/2527882/t…

Cheri DiNovo favours a system more like Calgary’s, where officials avoided breed bans while promoting education of dog owners and children. Bites in Calgary have dropped dramatically since the mid-1980s.
globalnews.ca/news/2527882/t…

Haters gonna hate.