Word: bulled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Officials of animal-protection societies tell of pit bulls being given live kittens or small dogs, such as poodles, to tear apart. Often they are fed gunpowder or hot sauce in the mistaken belief that this will increase the animals' pain threshold. Jean Sullivan, director of the Memphis-based Humane Society, charges that some owners have tried to increase their dogs' natural aggressiveness by keeping them tied up with collars of baling wire or running them on treadmills until they are exhausted. The pit bull's jaws -- which can exert as much force...
...this orgy of pain and violence? "The dogs are almost like an extension of the owners' egos," says Orville Walls, a Philadelphia veterinarian. "The owners think, 'I may be low man on the economic totem pole, but I have the meanest, toughest dog on the street.' " Owning a pit bull, says Robert Armstrong, Houston's chief animal controller, "is a warning to others to stay off the sidewalk." Randall Lockwood of the Humane Society notes that the animals have become increasingly popular as dog fighting has moved from rural areas into cities. They appeal "to the disfranchised and the unemployed...
...result of the growing fear of these killer dogs, responsible owners have been put on the defensive. The name pit bull loosely applies to a crossbred strain of the American Staffordshire terrier and the American pit bullterrier as well as to other varieties. The most ferocious dogs, says Pat Owens, director of the Women's S.P.C.A. of Pennsylvania, are crossbred with German shepherds or Doberman pinschers. Richard Laue of the Northern California Pit Bullterrier Association accuses these "backyard breeders" of producing unpredictable "garbage dogs...
Despite the dogs' bloody reputation, owners such as Laue insist that purebred pit bulls have a "steady temperament and intense loyalty." Indeed, breeders believe that in time the animal will regain its gentler image of the 1930s, when a pit bull played Pete in the Our Gang films. Only 30 years ago, notes Ed Almeida, a dog trainer in El Monte, Calif., the Doberman was the most vicious of dogs. Now, he says, after years of careful breeding, Dobermans are "big boobs" compared with the pit bulls...
Bonner is among millions of individual Americans who are making a private killing in the wild bull market of the 1980s, which will turn five years old on Aug. 13. They have come back with growing confidence to the stock market they fled during the bearish 1970s. "The longer the bull market goes on, the more believers there are," says Charles Neuhaus, a broker for Houston's Underwood, Neuhaus. During the first half of this decade, the number of Americans who own shares in individual companies or stock-market mutual funds increased from 30.2 million to more than 47 million...