Pit Bulls For Dummies. D. Caroline Coile

Introduction

      Pull up a chair and spend some time with one of the most amazing, yet controversial, breeds to ever wag a tail. A breed of satin and steel, Pit Bulls are a mixture of softness and strength, an uncanny canine combination of fun, foolishness, and serious business, all wrapped up in love. If you ignore any of these ingredients you’re cheating yourself, and your dog, of the best relationship possible. My aim with this book has been to include the same mixture. Parts of it will be fun, a few parts perhaps even foolish, and much of it serious — always with the aim of strengthening and lengthening the bond between you and dog, and ensuring the Pit Bull earns back its good name.

      But this book, like the breed, also comes with a caveat. As much as I hate to admit it, the breed has earned its controversial status. The Pit Bull has another side, one that too many dog lovers (and books) deny, ignore, or excuse. To do so isn’t fair to Pit Bull owners, other dogs, and the breed itself. Understanding this breed — both the good and the bad — is the best way to protect it. The irrefutable fact is that more Pit Bulls have killed more people and other dogs than any other type of dog has done. Owning any dog is a big responsibility, but because Pit Bulls aren’t like any other dog, owning a Pit Bull requires even more vigilance.

      This is not a book meant to sit on your shelf as a collector’s item. This book should have ragged pages and chewed covers, with dog hairs as bookmarks. It should have imprints of tiny puppy teeth and full-grown paw prints marking the pages with your dog’s progress through life, and when one day it comes time to place it back on the shelf with the last chapter christened with tears, you will have no regrets. You will have known that you and your dog shared a life of fun, foolishness, and love, all made possible because of some serious stuff. But for now, just make sure you don’t get so immersed in reading that you forget to play with your dog!

About This Book

Whether this is the only dog book you’ll have on your shelf, or whether your shelves are jammed with dog books, I wrote this book to be the one book you can count on when it comes to caring for and enjoying your Pit Bull. Too many dog care books are filled with unrealistic scare tactics that would cause anyone to just give up, and others are filled with hand-me-down dog lore that has no basis in reality. I did my best to make sure you won’t find either of those in this book, but instead, evidence-based information that you can rely on when deciding whether whether this is the breed for you and, if the answer is yes, how you can best raise your dog to be the dog of your dreams.

      Who should read this book? The people who think Pit Bulls should be purged from the face of the earth, as well as those who think it’s all how you raise them. Neither point of view is correct. The real Pit Bull lies somewhere in between, the victim of both people who hate him too much or love him too much to understand the total dog.

      This book is a reference. The chapters are self-contained chunks of information that you can read in any order you want. If you want to read the book from beginning to end, feel free, but if you prefer to skip around and read the topics that interest you, be my guest! The Table of Contents and Index can help you find what you’re looking for.

      Sidebars (text in gray boxes) and paragraphs marked with the Technical Stuff icon (see “Icons Used in This Book”) are skippable. Also, within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

Foolish

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