[abbyyymillerrr]

Breed Specific Legislation

What would you classify as a vicious dog breed? Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, German Shepherds, maybe Chow Chows? Those are only a few of the dogs that are being targeted as violent dogs in the United States of America. What happens when your favorite dog breed becomes banned for violent acts? Because your banning the dog breed, not the irresponsible owner. Breed Specific Legislation is only an excuse to not deal with the real issue on hand. The real issue would be the idiotic reckless owners! Those dog breeds make great family pets just like any other dog!
When a ban is put out for a certain dog breed, most are impounded and sent straight to death row. Some owners have a chance to reclaim their dog and take it out of the county and to never return again. More then half of those dogs had never done anything wrong. They had no history of ever hurting anything besides a few shoes! So why make the whole dog breed suffer because of insensitive owners who failed to take care of their own dogs? Those inconsiderate owners will just move on to another breed, and train it to be just as aggressive as the previous dog breed they had.
Specific dog breeds are not "nice" or good with kids--individual dogs are. Just like specific dog breeds don’t bite – but individual dogs do! Behind every inappropriately biting dog is an owner who failed to control it! Humane societies have countless stories of owners routinely leaving the dogs chained for days, starving them, burning them with acid, feeding them Tabasco sauce and making them wear barbed-wire collars -- all to make them as angry and aggressive as possible. Owners can do that to any dog breed, and it would most definitely work on any of them. One study found that in nearly 25% of all fatal dog-bite cases, owners had been involved in illegal dog fighting; more than half the time, the dogs are chained, which contributes to aggressive behavior. “You can make any dog real mean" -- the breed doesn't matter, Patricia Deshler, the Wichita Kennel Club vice president, said “singling out a breed is like singling out someone's race.”
Breed bans don't work. As with most behavior-related issues-- whether it's overeating or aggression--the dogs are rarely the problem. The owners are! One recent study backs this up: Owners of "high-risk" breeds are four times as likely to have a criminal record as owners of other dog breeds. What we really need is bad-owner bans. Pit bulls pass temperament tests 84.1% of the time, which ranks them slightly better than golden retrievers (83.8%) and cocker spaniels (81.7%), and well above miniature schnauzers (78.6%). Pit bulls have been proven to have a better temperament, better than a Golden Retriever as the statistics show. Pit Bulls, and other bad dog breeds just tend to fall into the wrong hands and are trained to be vicious. They are even given a bad image on television. Such as in hip-hop videos, they are snarling from the back seats of SUVs. And we watch them in movies and on TV, in heavy chains, guarding the homes of their gun-toting, drug-dealing masters. Once pit bulls are banned from Hollywood, you would start seeing a golden retriever on movies as the heavy chained guard dog that is about to attack a cop. This would lead to the ban of the once great family pet, Golden Retriever.
“Any dog can be trained to be aggressive”, said Doug Whitman, chairman of the psychology department at Wayne State University. “It fundamentally comes down, not to the pets, but to people,” he said. “You can teach any creature to attack, and you can teach any of them not to.” Patricia Deshler, the Wichita Kennel Club vice president, said targeting pit bulls wouldn't be effective because the ‘bad guys’ are just going to find a bigger and meaner dog that they can make as a nuisance.
“American Pit Bull Terriers make excellent family companions and have always been noted for their love of children. - The American Pit Bull Terriers would not make good guard dogs, since they are very friendly, even with strangers.” States Alice Bixler in an article she wrote for Dog World in September 2004. So how did they get this image of a vicious fighting dog? Because the owners of American Pit Bull Terriers left them out, starving them to death, torturing them daily just so they would fight another dog for their viewing pleasure. Then one day, the dog escapes from its horrible life, running the streets loose, and some kid decides to walk straight up to it. The dog scared to death of possibly getting hurt again, attacks to protect themselves.
A dog can’t voice its own opinion. Which means a dog can’t tell you what it went through, how it was treated, why they attacked that person. We give people a chance to tell their side of the story, and if we didn’t, would we just ban that certain race from the United States? So why blame the dogs for not knowing what to do? It’s always the owners fault for a misbehaving dog! Soon you’ll see more and more vicious dog breeds becoming better family pets than ever before, because they fell into good hands, instead of falling into some drug dealer looking for some way to make money. Those dog breeds will start being seen as the great breeds they were meant for. Instead of some vicious dog, that no one wants to run into on the street. Never judge the breed, unless you know how it was being treated! You might be ruining the future for even more dog breeds!

this is for my english class, i am only a ninth grader.

[CaityK]

Well, you get your point across. Decent paper aside from some grammatical and spelling errors.

[nattiej1976]

For a shorter essay, you have covered the subject and some primary issues and feelings really well. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing. Keep up the good work.

[Miss Lily Bug]

Well that was a wonderful essay! If I was your mother I would be very proud of you. It sounds like you have a good head on your shoulders. I totally agree with you on this.

My husband and I had a doberman pinscher, and of course most people would automatically assume he was vicious based on "popular rumor". This could not be further from the truth. He was the biggest baby around. If you sat down on the couch, he would hop up and sit down next to you, then next thing you knew he was in your lap. He for some reason thought he was a lap dog...all 90 lbs. of him! His bark was definitely worse than his bite!

So yes, it is all in how you train them, but I do believe that certain breeds have certain instincts, or temperments. Just like humans, it is pretty much in how you are raised!

Miss Lily Bug