America's top kennel club accepted pit bulls in 1935 only by renaming them
In the 1890s the American Kennel Club refused to register pit bull breeders' dogs because of their fighting past. By the 1930s it wanted a distinctly American breed with decades of records behind it, so it recognised them in 1935 under a new name, Staffordshire Terriers, and barred them from fights.
Pit bull is not one breed but an umbrella. Americans typically apply it to four or five related breeds, among them the American Bully and both Staffordshire types, plus any mix that resembles them; in Britain it means the American Pit Bull Terrier alone. Almost all descend from the bull-and-terrier, bred in early 19th-century Britain by crossing the heavy Old English Bulldog with nimble terriers, because lighter, quicker dogs proved better in the fighting pit. Those dogs reached North America in the 1870s.
The registry politics that followed were tangled. Rebuffed by the American Kennel Club, breeders founded the United Kennel Club in 1898, which kept pedigrees and also regulated fights. In Britain, where the Protection of Animals Act 1911 had effectively ended organised dogfighting, enthusiasts in the Black Country kept breeding, and the name Staffordshire Bull Terrier first appeared in adverts in 1930; the Kennel Club accepted it in 1935. To avoid confusion, the American club rebranded its own version the American Staffordshire Terrier in 1972.
The reputation problem never went away. American states began outlawing organised dogfights in 1874, with a federal ban on animal fighting only in 2007, yet estimates in the mid-2000s put more than 40,000 Americans in the illegal trade. Hospital-based statistics from North American groups attribute over half of dog bites to pit bulls although they make up about 6 percent of pet dogs, while other studies dispute such readings, and some insurers refuse to cover them. Welfare groups in San Francisco and New York have tried and failed to rename the type.
Laws now hinge on identification. Britain's Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 puts the burden on owners and uses trained Dog Legislation Officers, and France banned pit bull types in 1999 while merely restricting registered American Staffordshire Terriers.
Source: Pit bull
