My buddy from high school made me confess I was wrong about pit bulls for a decade

Ran into this guy I used to skate with, Marcus, at a gas station in Tulsa last month. He's a dog trainer now and he had this big pit bull sitting in his truck, calm as can be. I made some dumb comment about how those dogs are ticking time bombs, and he just looked at me and said, 'Bro, I've rehabbed 40 of them, they're only aggressive when people make them that way.' That hit different because I grew up hearing my uncle talk about them like they were weapons. So I actually went to his facility the next week and watched him work with this scared rescue that had been chained up for 3 years. The dog was shaking the whole time but never snapped once. I had to sit there and admit I'd been repeating old school nonsense since I was like 15. Has anyone else had to eat their words about a breed they were dead wrong on for years?

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terryh204d ago

I remember reading a study a few years back that looked at dog bite statistics and they found breed identification was wrong like 40% of the time just based on looks. That kinda stuck with me because people were blaming pits for stuff that was probably labs and shepherds. Your story about Marcus sounds a lot like what that vet I follow on YouTube says, she's always going on about how environment beats genetics for most dogs. I had the same kind of wake up call with Rottweilers after my cousin adopted one that was the sweetest couch potato. It's wild how long we hold onto stuff our family told us without ever checking it out ourselves. Good on you for actually going to see it with your own eyes instead of just nodding and moving on.