Clarity
creates freedom.

'Pit bull' isn't a breed. The veterinary profession's own review calls it an ambiguous category spanning several pedigrees and anything blocky-headed. Most of them were labeled rather than born.

Two thousand dog genomes and eighteen thousand owner surveys: breed explains about nine percent of how a dog behaves. What a dog looks like is far easier to predict than who it is.

Pete the Pup, of The Little Rascals, was an American Pit Bull Terrier. The ring around his eye was three-quarters natural. The studio painted in the rest, which is the most Hollywood sentence available.

There is no locking jaw. No dog has one; no such mechanism exists in any canine skull. The myth was invented. The anatomy was not.

Tige, of Buster Brown shoes, was a pit bull, and probably the first talking pet in American comics. What made him unusual is that the adults could hear him.

Shelter pit bulls work police detection — narcotics, explosives, arson. K9 Tweaker of Grimes County, Texas came out of a shelter and went on to find drugs and a weapon.

Jonny Justice was seized from Michael Vick's kennels and nearly put down. He became a therapy dog who sat still in a library while children read aloud to him. ASPCA Dog of the Year, 2014.

Helen Keller kept a bull-and-terrier type dog named Sir Thomas — the sort now filed under 'pit bull.' Her archive still holds the photograph, taken in 1902.

The ASPCA's line is not a slogan, it is a filed position: pit bulls are no more likely than other dogs to show aggression toward people.

Sergeant Stubby, the most celebrated dog of the First World War, is claimed as a pit bull all over the internet. The Smithsonian, which holds him, says he was of no particular breed. Even the famous ones get relabeled by whoever needs them.