From where we sit in New Mexico, it seems upside down. This is Colorado we’re talking about, the state with such a shortage of adoptable animals, until recently it took in thousands of homeless animals from New Mexico every year.
    Yet the fact is that such a cruel, senseless, draconian law could not have been enacted in Albuquerque—though legislators here have surely tried (most recently, State Sen. Sue Wilson Beffort of Bernalillo in 2012). Pit bulls are the third most popular breed of dog in New Mexico after Chihuahuas and Labrador Retrievers, according to this year’s annual survey by Banfield pet hospitals—and they live with families across the economic spectrum. “Some of our largest donors own multiple pit bulls, and these are not low-income folks,” says Peggy Weigle, director of Animal Humane New Mexico. “People love their pit bulls.” If our animal shelters are full of homeless pits, it is partly because they are so very popular; the Albuquerque city shelters also counted some 107 Chihuahuas in its latest inventory.
    There is no denying, however, that “pitties” take longer to get adopted and are euthanized at nearly three times the rate of Chihuahuas—and not only because large dogs are harder to place. Even in New Mexico, pit bulls have an image problem, no matter how many people love them and swear that they make great family pets. Experts may testify that breed bans are unscientific, illogical, and ineffective—as they have done for a decade—but they are drowned out by the impact of sensational mauling stories and politicians capitalizing on public fear. It has proved simple enough to get large numbers of people to believe that Muslims “hate freedom,” young black men are violent, and blondes are dumb. Why should it be any different for the all-American dog?

“THE AMERICAN DOG” is what the pit bull is labeled in a beautifully written story in the August 2014 Esquire magazine by Tom Junod, who pens a long meditation on the strange public relations gap between his cute, silly family dog and the crimes committed elsewhere by dogs that bear a superficial resemblance to him.
    “Pit bull,” he reminds us, is not even a breed of dog. The vast majority of dogs described this way are mixed breeds—in Albuquerque the mix is often Labrador Retriever—or belong to one of two dozen breeds that have been called pit bulls in various times and places. What marks these dogs is a certain look, now affectionately known as “blockhead.”
    Square-jawed, muscular, and squat, so-called pit bulls cannot be identified by DNA testing. There are, in other words, no pit bull genes, meaning the 47-point checklist that Miami animal control uses to determine if a dog is at least half pit bull would be laughable if it were not actually used to condemn people’s dogs. As Junod put it, any dog crossed with a pit bull is a pit bull, and if that dog bites, it’s always the pit bull part that bit.   

     Jeff Nichols, an Albuquerque veterinarian and well-known animal behavior expert, says there is no heritable trait such as “viciousness.” “The genetic issue is very complex,” he told an audience during Pitbull Awareness Week events in November. It is impossible to predict traits even in the most rigidly controlled breed lines— which is why so many dogs bred to fight end up rejected and killed. “It’s remarkably complex, and to reduce it to breed is a ridiculous oversimplification.”
    Yet as recently as June 2014, no less a self-appointed authority than Time magazine ran an article called “The Problem with Pitbulls,” which resuscitated the tired rumors debunked years hence. Time later had to publish a correction stating that the horrifying attack at the center of author Charlotte Alter’s complaint— the mauling of a 3-year-old by a pit bull—apparently never took place.
    
IF THERE IS a viciousness that adheres to pit bulls, it is the circularity of the argument about their breeding. Three recognized breeds—American Staffordshire Terrier, American Pit Bull Terrier, and Staffordshire Bull Terrier— were indeed raised to fight through selection of such traits as prey drive, pain tolerance, “gameness,” and bite inhibition toward humans.
    This reputation made the dogs popular in the criminal underworld, where they were sloppily bred in pursuit of the muscular, “bad-ass” look that made them even more popular with the wrong kind of people. These poor dogs were often abused and neglected, chained up and encouraged to be aggressive. Coinciding with the rise of the Mexican drug cartels and crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, the dogs made an irresistible poster child for America’s social ills.
    The popular media, always drawn to simple ideas and slogans, clamped its jaws on the pit bull attack genre, perpetuating such strange rumors as the “locking jaw” theory, or the idea that pit bulls could bite with greater force than alligators. Politicians came clamoring behind with demands to ban these dangerous dogs, although dogs have bitten and mauled humans since the beginning of time.
    By the year 2000, breed-specific legislation was being proposed or in place in 38 states, according to a 2001 report by the Michigan State University Animal Legal & Historical Center. Banned breeds included Rottweilers, Chow Chows, German Shepherds, Doberman Pinschers, Mastiffs, and American Bull-dogs, among others. 

  “In the 1980s and ’90s, it was a very popular thing to do,” says Lou Guyton, senior director of community initiatives at the ASPCA, noting that many municipalities have since backed off as the bans failed to prevent dog attacks. And no wonder—according to Nichols, bite reports cite many different breeds, most often Labradors, Jack Russell Terriers, and Cocker Spaniels, all hugely popular dogs.
    Unfortunately, pit bulls still find themselves caught in a self-fulfilling cycle of poverty, abuse, and unsociable behavior that continues to be supported by discrimination from homeowner associations and insurance companies. It is not, in fact, any retreat from scapegoating that accounts for the dogs’ rehabilitation. Rather, it is the rise of a different voice in the dangerous dog debate, one that is female, educated, media-savvy, persistent— and a direct challenge to the image of the dogs as a hyper-macho accessory to drug lords and gangsters.

MARE ISRAEL WAS probably the first dog-lover in New Mexico to notice and act on a whole category of dogs being put to death as a matter of course. In 1999 her son brought home a dog that was “so ugly it was cute,” she recalls, “and I asked what it was. When he told me, I said, ‘Are you crazy?!’”
    But Israel had done a master’s thesis on manipulation by the media, so she set out to learn everything she could about these dogs whose image did not match her reality. After she got a second one— a big black male named Jake—she consulted with a behaviorist about problems the dog was having with her wolf hybrid. “They told me I had to put the dog down because he was a pit bull. I had nine dogs, and they said he would hurt every dog I had and hurt my mother,” Israel says incredulously.
    “It made me so mad,” she said, because Jake was a dog who had been poked in the eye by babies and done nothing but wiggle happily. The shelters told her that they had no choice but to kill pit bulls because good adopters could not be found for them.
    “I said, really? Well watch this.” Israel went on to found Pet-a-Bulls, which has pulled unadoptable dogs from shelters for 15 years and placed them in “wonderful homes,” Israel says: “people at Sandia, Intel, doctors, lawyers.” She feels the group helped change the perception that pit bulls belonged with “the kind of people who didn’t have the resources to care for them,” as she puts it.
    Rena Distasio cites a similar wakeup call that led to the founding of Responsibly Adopting Albuquerque Pitbulls (RAAP). As a volunteer dog walker for the Albuquerque shelters, she learned about an entire building full of “big black scary dogs” that were never walked and bound to be euthanized—pit bulls.  

  “I had been around the breed my whole life, and decided those dogs needed enrichment too,” says Distasio. She and Jennifer Conklin founded their education and advocacy group in 2006 to help get some of those dogs adopted.
    It was a time when the animal rescue movement was coalescing nationwide, thanks to the Internet and social media. New Mexicans Kassie Brown, Rachel Starr, and Tiffany Truitt took a page from the success of the Chicago-based group Pinups for Pitbulls, which published a popular calendar of fetching models posing with their “bully breeds.” The three pit bull owners founded The Babes and Bullies in Albuquerque in 2007.
    Like the Chicago group, BNB goes out into the community doing outreach, rather than sitting at tables handing out pamphlets, says president Tarrah Hobbs. “When people see that we aren’t what they pictured a pit bull owner to be, I think they’re more open to hearing our experience with the breed.”
    Dog trainer Maria Colbert, former vice-president of Babes and Bullies, likens the soft approach—more carrot than stick—to what she learned in sales about approaching people non-judgmentally and seeking common ground.
    The “pin-up” side of the message, she says, is really about marketing. Women attract attention and help shift the image of pit bulls from vicious killer to “big bad bully.” This also attracts a younger generation of women to dog rescue, Colbert says.
    
PIT BULLS NOW routinely appear at the sides of articulate women who stand ready to act as “ambassadors” for the breed and defend against trespasses in the politics of canine correctness. While the dog fighter tries to stay out of sight, the Bully Babe is everywhere at public events, on social media, handing out pamphlets, giving speeches, making documentaries, writing press releases and letters to the editor.
    Her message of the pit bull as ideal family pet and war hero may not be as compelling as the “time bomb on legs” of 20 years ago. But in New Mexico, at least, it has taken hold, thanks to constant attention to rescuing the dogs’ image, as well as their lives.
    “In the placement of our dogs, we’re very picky,” explains Angela Stell, president of NMDog, which places a lot of pit bull type dogs because of the type of community outreach work they do. “When we choose a guardian for any one of our dogs, we expect them to be great advocates for dogs. When we choose a guardian for one of our pitties, we also expect them to be a great advocate for the breed.”
    NMDog often requires adopters to attend basic obedience training, avoid dog parks, and act responsibly to avoid contributing to a negative stereotype. “It’s not everybody who can do that,” says Stell, “and that’s why sometimes our pit bull type kiddos wait longer to find their home.”
    In the South Valley neighborhoods they canvass together on anti-cruelty sweeps, nearly all the dogs helped by NMDog and the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office are pit mixes, says Lt. Andi Taylor. “People get them because they think it gives a personification of toughness, so they try to make the dog tough,” adds Taylor, a pit bull owner, “when they are actually the sweetest dogs who just want to please their owners.”
    The dogs proliferate, in other words, because they are easily obtained, often unaltered, and basically have become the de facto street dog.
    
INDEED, AT Albuquerque’s three largest shelters—the municipal east and west side shelters and nonprofit Animal Humane—pit bulls and Chihuahuas comprise 58 percent of all homeless dogs. Adopters come in both types, the shelter directors say, those who definitely do or do not want a pit.
    “It’s the in-betweens that we want to convince that it’s a really good family pet,” says Barbara Bruin, director of Albuquerque Animal Welfare. Income doesn’t have a lot to do with it, she says, but rather how willing people are to believe the media.
    With pit bulls among the top five favorite breeds in most states, why would news outlets like Time persist with the idea that “the real problem” is “pit bulls were bred to be violent”? Perhaps for the same reason they persist in portraying certain racial or religious groups as inherently violent, or certain sexual orientations as inherently depraved—because it lets everyone else off the hook. While it has become dangerous and even illegal to discriminate against humans, targeting animals is no crime. They are legally property, to be seized and destroyed like criminal booty—as they are in Denver.
    Blaming pit bulls for the viciousness of human society helps us “solve” intractable problems for which we all might otherwise share some responsibility, like poverty, injustice, substance abuse, and a cultural obsession with violence and revenge.
    Animal protection groups now frequently link animal with human abuse, tracing both to factors that lead children to grow up lacking empathy for others. But there is nothing illogical or incongruent to a child witnessing his first dog fight. It makes perfect sense in a society that presents killing as entertainment, worships firepower, and loves competition.
    Someone is always the loser, any child will tell you, and it is the one who is weakest. That’s why thousands of innocent animals who were bred to look vicious must die to redeem humankind.