The Pitbull Controversy: A Brief Overview
There isn’t a lot of controversy surrounding the shelter community. It is largely regarded in our society as a positive good to have groups that rescue animals from harmful situations and rehabilitate them for happy homes. Of course there are a few people of the opinion that shelter animals are "damaged goods," but by and large these are in the minority. However, there is one topic on which popular opinion and the shelter community widely differ: the subject of pitbull ownership, and whether or not it is a danger to one's family and neighbors to keep a pitbull.
The popular conception of pitbulls is that they are far more aggressive than other dog breeds, that their bites are far more dangerous than those of other dog breeds, and that they pose a threat to children and other dogs. This perception has caused many communities and counties to create breed-specific regulations against pitbulls, has caused shelters to be filled with pitbulls no one wants to adopt because they're "dangerous," and has even caused some dog trainers to discriminate against pitbulls and pitbull owners. A good example of this is a recent kerfuffle over the training group Piazza's K-9 Services Unlimited, which recently published these two Facebook posts.
In the first, they offer free training to those who "return" their adopted or purchased pitbull and acquire a new dog of a different breed. In the other they attack and mock pitbull owners and assert their right to train whoever they want to train.
Many in the shelter community found Piazza's K-9 Services Unlimited reprehensible for their advertised dog trade-in discount. They see pitbulls as being largely misunderstood, rather than innately more violent than other dog breeds. In an article on pitbullinfo.org, the author suggests that the popular perception of pitbulls is due to four major factors: reporting bias (bite incidents involving pitbulls receive 100x more media coverage than those involving other breeds), breed misidentification (an average of 50% of media stories misidentify a dog as being a "pitbull-type" breed), comparing dog types to dog breeds (pitbull being a category of dog, as opposed to a specific breed such as GSD or chihuahua), and statistics that fail to account for breed population sizes (pitbulls are a popular breed type, and statistics that measure danger by incident without taking population into account present an inaccurate picture of how dangerous pitbulls are).