When I was a kid, I never heard about pit bull dogs.
I got a cocker spaniel puppy in 1965. Cocker spaniels had been the most popular breed in America in the 1950s, but the quality of the dogs declined as puppy mills churned out increasingly inbred examples, and now you never hear about them anymore.
My cocker had some good features, but he was bitey. Interestingly, he was a militant pacifist, kind of like Sikhs who see it as their religious duty to war upon whoever starts a war. If one of my friends got aggressive, my dog would bite him. But, that wasn’t out of loyalty, but out of principle. If I pushed one of my friends, my dog would growl and snap at me. I tried to explain that to the Animal Control Officer who frequently came and placed our house under rabies quarantine for a couple of weeks after each bite, but he didn’t seem to care.
But at least my dog let go after he bit somebody. The problem with pit bulls is that, while they aren’t particularly bitey, they don’t like to let go after they’ve sunk their teeth into human flesh.
But nobody knew that when I was young, because pit bulls were extremely obscure, at least in the San Fernando Valley. I can recall watching the movie Patton on its TV premiere on Sunday, November 19, 1972 (a huge event that earned 65% of the TV audience) and being amazed by the existence of bull terriers, General George S. Patton’s favorite pet. I’d never seen such a dog in all my 13 years.
I was talking to a friend today about my new dog, who looks rather like a deer (but acts very much like a dog). He said, “So you picked the only non-pit bull at the shelter?”
Well, yeah, that’s why we had to participate in a raffle and then, after my wife’s application was picked, audition to show we were worthy.
He then explained how he got talked into deciding to get a rescue dog. So he went to the dog shelter, but all the dogs were some fraction pit bull. Eventually, he succumbed and picked a very pit bullish dog.
When he got it home, it was affectionate but terrifying. So he called in an expensive dog trainer to show him how to discipline it. “All you have to do,” he was told, “is show him who is boss.”
But the expert disciplinarian kept having to upscale his methods from about 3 on a 1 to 10 scale to 11.
My friend said, “Yeah, I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood too and while it would be cool to masterfully train my pit bull to faithfully obey my every whim, I’m not a war hero stunt man alpha male like Brad Pitt’s character is.”
“Maybe I should just pay for a golden retriever.”
The dog trainer then suggested to my friend that he get an electric shock collar and zap the dog every time he got overenthusiastic.
My friend demurred.
The expert eventually agreed that this wasn’t working out and promised to find the pit bull a good home.
And he did…with a stunt man.
Brad Pitt himself isn’t really that much of an alpha male. His most brilliant directors, Steven Soderbergh in Oceans 1X and Quentin Tarantino in Once, have intuited that while Pitt looks like a leading man, he is, deep down, a sidekick and thus constructed great roles for him as a sidekick to Clooney and DiCaprio.
