Prometheus 6

It's too hard...just look at all the ways you can fuck it up.

(...With apologies to 'Chinatown' ...Forget about it, Jake! I think it's just Staten Island!)

Back in my graphic art days, I got sent up on assignment to work on part of an exhibit at the Staten Island museum.

(I'm STILL stunned that there's a Staten Island museum!)

(I'm STILL stunned that there's a Staten Island museum!)

Sure there is. Somewhere inthe bowels of the building is some Betamax footage I shot inhigh school for a documentary history of The Black Man of Staten Island.

There's a museum of Tibetan art too. Lotta weird little things like that, actually.

Back to paranoia, it turns out there were three helicopters, and today it seems they're romoving a portable watchtower from the neighborhood and there's significantly fewer Mexicans on the street.

In 1971 I was living on Downey Street in the Haight-Ashbury. Every night for months the cops would fly a helicopter over the neighborhood and shine an 11,000 watt light onto people's homes and backyards. The block that I lived on was especially defiant. Folks would come out of their houses and apartments and jeer at the cops as they flew over. It was bizarre.

Damn. I found out what the helicopters were about. Two pit bulls ate a 90 year old man.

That is horrible. Whoever owns those dogs should be imprisoned.

They interviewed a kid...literally a kid...that said his dogs don't just attack people. Both of them are dead, and the old dude is close to it.

"that said his dogs don't just attack people."

Well, they did this time.

(...Man! That is just TOO wild!)

I know that there are die hard Pitt Bull proponents out there, but I've never been comfortable with the idea of people owning any type of animal that has the ability to go as nuclear as the do.

It's always them the same story:

Fun loving animals that would never hurt anyone intentionally without being provoked.

At a minimum, I don't think they're animals that are fit for urban habitation.

(....I say keep them out on the open range where they can kill coyote and what not!)

Maybe there should be a permit system for aggressive breeds. The owners need just as much training as the animals.

I written this before here: those dogs were trained to be aggressive toward human beings. The pit men, i.e., those who bred and developed this breed put down any puppy that showed aggression toward human beings. Consequently, the American Pit Bull Terrier was one of the few dog breeds that was bred to have an aversion to biting human beings unlike German Shepards, Cocker Spaniels or Rottweilers.

As long as the breed was fancied by people who fought dogs this standard was maintained. This standard deteriorated when the breed began to be fancied by urban and rural toughs, many with criminal histories, who viewed the dogs as symbols of virile hyper-masculinity. Most of them did not know anything about the history of the breed and the steps that pit men had taken to breed aggressiveness toward human beings out of the line.

In short, this new group began to indiscriminately breed their dogs and to encourage traits in them that pit men would have found undesirable. The great animal trainer Richard Stratton argued, for example, that pit bulls should never be used as guard dogs because such work encouraged their worse tendencies. Shepards and Dobermans can be called off of a human they may attack in their work as guard dogs but not Pit Bulls, at least not easily.

The American Pit Bull Terrier was once considered the quintessential American dog. Gentle, fun loving and playful but fierce when aroused against enemies. The ads for Buster Brown shoes featured a child and a pit bull. Petey, the dog in the Little Rascals, was a pit bull. The humorist James Thurber wrote a memoir dedicated to his family's pit bull. The Staffordshire Bull Terrier which is the English cousin of the American Pit Bull Terrier is known in England as the "nursemaid's dog" because it is so gentle and watchful of young children.

Over the past twenty years we have watched the destruction of the reputation and the breed of one of the true American dogs. Backyard breeders and their ilk have turned these wonderful family pets into fearsome and loathsome animals. Too many of these dogs are dangerous now because of how they have been socialized and because there is no control over the breeding stock. Dogs that should be culled from the litters and put down are allowed to live while other pups deemed not aggressive enough are killed. (BTW, this is exactly what Michael Vick and his posse of knuckleheads were doing.)

That kid who said that his dogs don't act that way is either lying or believes that it is okay for pitt bulls to show aggression toward human beings. His dogs were bred and trained to act the way did. Whoever was legally responsible for those dogs should go to jail. There is no excuse whatsoever for dogs who are that aggressive to be on the street and not be leashed and muzzled.

O.G. is still alive but he's lost a leg and may lose more limbs, they say. I don't know if he'll appreciate surviving.