When I watched this video of a four year-old girl in the U.S. feeding a roomful of hungry male pit bulls, one fact stood out: these are amazingly well trained dogs. (So well trained, in fact, that I wished to call up the little girl and have her train my dog!)
Mom Bites Off Dog's Ear To Save Daughter
Yet many people who watched the very same footage saw something entirely different: a little girl within close range to a pack of hell hounds that would tear her limb from limb in a heartbeat.
"She is in danger! Where are her parents?" said Mary Menefee on Twitter. (Call it a hunch, but something tells me the person filming may be the girl's mother.)
"I'm ok with someone owning pit bulls. But it's a strict liability thing. They are KNOWN killers," said another user, DostoevskyShade.
This Town Is Going To "Dispose" ALL Living Pit Bulls and RottweilersIt's no secret that pit bulls have a bad rep, and there have been attacks. Yes, even fatalities. While I don't condone such incidents, they stem from irresponsible ownership—and the fact that pit bulls tend to be something of a status symbol for precisely the sort of people who should
never own a dog of any kind.
I know plenty of responsible pit owners, who have lovely dogs to show for it. It's clear that the dogs filmed are an exceedingly disciplined bunch. Witness how patiently they wait and follow the girl's orders, even when the food is on the ground.
Dogs all share the same evolutionary origins.
It's a fallacy to assume that some breeds are natural killers while others are natural softies. At the risk of reading too much into a two-minute clip, my guess is that this family falls on the responsible end of ownership. The proof as they say, is in the YouTube footage, which has been viewed more than 120,000 times.
Image Source: WikiCommons