Pit Bull Notes from Seattle

There’s a higher bar for pit bulls. I think back to walking our pit bull, Chaney, in Madison Park–a wealthy Seattle neighborhood we rented a house in for several years–and how often neighbors crossed the street at the sight of us. Another time I was in front of the neighborhood grocery with Chaney on leash waiting for Miguel to pick up milk and bread. An offleash, yellow lab ran up on us. The owner scolded me when I had to body block Chaney from reacting and told me to keep my dog under control. 

Another time I was running with both dogs on leash, rounded a corner, and a startled man jumped out of the way yelling, “Get your pit bulls away from me!” My dogs hadn’t noticed him til he started yelling at us.

Buffalo’s best friend is a Golden Retriever named Conner. Conner and Buffalo have the exact same temperament: confident, hyper, goofy, and nutty about people. To me, they’re the same dog. To many others, Buffalo is an unpredictable, scarey animal, and Conner is a sweetheart who just needs to work on his manners. Here are the two of them playing rough-and-tumble alongside us goofing off in the woods.

This brings me to two BullsEye dogs from 2006: Peanut and Clyde.

Peanut came to BullsEye via a Veterinary Hospital up north. She was found in a dumpster. Zipped up in a baseball bat bag. A good samaritan walking down the alley heard whimpering. Peanut’s story made the News, and she was lucky to survive with only a broken leg. She was about a year old when this happened.

 Overall she was a sweet girl but she was very reactive and scared in certain situations. Her triggers included men, loud noises, and unpredictable movement like bikes and skateboards.
While we loved this little girl, we couldn’t responsibly adopt her. Life is full of triggers, and we didn’t want her to live a life in fear. She didn’t meet the bar so we put her to sleep.

Meet Clyde. He lived his first few years chained up in a yard, was picked up as a stray, and landed at the Camano Island Animal Shelter. We never figured out where he came from but we could tell from his muscle development, teeth, and overall health on intake that he was a yard dog. Staff adored this squatty, hugalicious guy from the start so they contacted BullsEye–and we adored him too. Well, I mostly adored him. He chewed up the back of my car but I got over it.

Clyde’s a charmer–he’s one of those dogs that melts your heart. He joined us at the rescue booth at the AKC show that year, and people lined up to meet him. It wasn’t long before he was adopted by a wonderful family that includes small kids. Clyde has appeared in numerous rescue calendars to raise money to help other pit bulls. He’s a star.

It’s tough to be a pit bull right now and that’s why our pit bulls have to be perfect. We can’t rescue every pit bull that deserves a chance, dogs like Peanut who are afraid because of what people did to them. Because as justifiable as it might be to be scared, a reaction would be another news headline about a vicous pit bull.

So we pass the bar over-and-over and hope that some day our pit bulls can be just dogs.

On MLK Day, just a few months after we got hitched on the beach in Mexico, we found out we had a bun in the oven. I’m 9 months pregnant in the photo below. While we were excited about welcoming another human being into our family, people started asking us what we were going to do with the dogs. Hunh?

We prided ourselves on being responsible pit bull owners and now we found ourselves in a position of having to defend Buffalo and Chaney even more. Since the baby hadn’t arrived yet, folks were quick to ask, “But how do you know your dogs won’t hurt the baby?”

Our family was scared. You’ll note they all live on the east coast, and no one in our family had actually met our dogs yet. My dad argued pit bulls are unpredictable killing machines. Just read the papers, right? No matter how many stats, quotes, research we cited, family members would reply, “Yeah, but we just don’t want it to be our baby girl.”

Our strategy was mailing our family copies of Pit Bulls for Dummies. My mom read every page and asked really good questions: What’s the difference between dog agression and people agression? How will the dogs know the baby’s not another dog? This was the kind of conversation I was happy to have. But most of the conversations–even with friends that loved our dogs–were irrational. But they taught me about fear and ultimately I learned a lot more about dogs as a result.

The hardest part is shrugging off the insinuations we’re not good parents because we own pit bulls. I imagine I’ll get asked this question less as Gigi gets older. But just last week, a co-worker asked–and this wasn’t the first time I’d been asked this punch-in-the-gut question: ”Aren’t you afraid they’ll drag her down the street and kill her?” 

No. I’m not afraid of my dogs. And pit bulls are just dogs. And we’re good dog owners that happen to have pit bulls as our beloved family pets. And we’re not perfect, but we’re pretty good parents that love our daughter to pieces.

Gigi is just a few weeks old in this photo with Buffalo Sky. If you wanna see a family album of Gigi with our dogs, click here.

I’ve broken most of the rules I’ve made for myself. I swore I’d never get a tattoo, and I did that when I was 29. I swore I’d never get married. I also swore I’d never own more than one pit bull at a time. I broke these two rules in 2004.

I started photographing BullsEye families with plans of doing a fundraising calendar project and met Chaney during one of the photo shoots.

He was one of the few dogs Diane Jessup pulled from the Olympia Shelter and released to BullsEye. You’ll recall Buffalo Sky also came to me by way of Diane.

His name was Chainsaw when he was surrendered to the shelter because he wasn’t potty trained. I thought, atleast they were keeping him inside. Despite his name, he was a gentle dog with a shy but trusting spirit. And he was a dog that by no fault of his own was moved between too many foster homes and adopters–10 different households in his first year. Here’s a photograph one of his foster families took of him.

The first time he was adopted, it was by a young guy who passed BullsEye’s rigorous screening process. We were shocked weeks later when we got a call that he was found in a cow pasture basking in the sun. And we were more shocked when the guy that had adopted him didn’t even know he’d gone missing. He came back to BullsEye.

The second time he was adopted, it was by a family with two, pre-teen kids. The dad wanted a pit bull because his brother had a pit bull that wiped her feet before she came in the house. This was the family I met when I went to photograph life with Chaney.

When I arrived, the mom and kids were bathing Chaney outside in a big, aluminum tub. He didn’t like it much but he closed his eyes and counted the minutes. Then he played keepaway with the kids as he ran the perimeter of their perfectly landscaped backyard.

As I took photos, I asked questions to get a feel for family life. I learned they were bathing him twice a week because the dad thought he smelled. I explained this wasn’t good for his coat and asked if they’d had his ears checked. No, they responded, but they were thinking of taking him in for a hurt leg–he’d been limping for weeks. Hunh, okay.

Given it was spring, the weather was increasingly nice so the mom said they spent as much time as possible outside with Chaney–there were only a few rooms in the house he was allowed in. When I went in for a glass of water, much of the house had white carpets and furnishings. The couches and chairs were covered in clear, plastic covers.

I left that day with a butterfly of doubt but I didn’t expect things to go sideways. The mom called us several weeks later and said we had to come get Chaney because he’d dug a hole in the yard. She was very upset and was clearly being directed to do something about that dog. We discovered they were leaving him outside in the backyard most of the time because he was getting the house dirty. Turns out Chaney didn’t know how to wipe his feet before entering the house.

We agreed to go get him and then the mom called back and said they worked it out and wanted to keep him. Lorrie and Kirstan swooped in. While Lorrie rang the doorbell, Kirstan went in the backyard, leashed up Chaney, and packed him safely in the car.

It was right to pull him. He came back to BullsEye with a blunt edge cut on his nose. He still wears the scar.
I’d never fostered an adult pit bull so I was wary but willing to give it a try. Buffalo and Chaney were play bows, wiggle butts, and snuggle hugs from day one. Miguel wanted to keep every foster dog so it was no surprise he wanted to keep Chaney–even with his quarky, scaredy cat behavior. It took me a month to break my two-pit bull rule–I caved on the way to a meet-and-greet with a potential adopter in Canada.

And I caved on my marriage rule. Two months after adopting Chaney, Miguel and I were married on the beach in Mexico. Love’s a good reason to break rules.