lovers and students of history. The members of the “fancy” knew their dog history—they could rattle off stats and names, breeds and bitches like a baseball fan could talk about ERAs and RBIs. Escorrega even had breeding cards with pictures and statistics, just like big baseball cards, and he could name famous dogs like you can name movie stars. Tim and John were also students of breeding and genetics. There are massive books of breeding, going back to the 1800s.
A champion is a dog that has won three fights, and a grand champion is a dog that has won five—these are the distinctions that owners of game-bred dogs want to breed to. John told me of Banjo, a famous biter that was a grand champion at three years old, which is young; so that means he probably wasn’t getting challenged with tough fights. “Banjo would run in and destroy the whole front end, but maybe a good wrassler could have handled him, and popular belief is Banjo was secretly a cur—he’s never reproduced.” In the end, though, winning is still winning.
Fighters, whether dog or man, have to win to matter. You can say what you want about Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali, but if they hadn’t been winning, no one would have paid attention. Tim even said to me once, “I don’t care about gameness—I just want to win.”
My only previous experience with dogfights had been the film Amores Perros, and this got a big snort of derision from Escorrega. “It’s very Hollywood. The owners are not shooting dogs and all crazy like that, and you would never fight a rottweiler against a pit bull, not at any kind of weight similarity.”
The American pit is the standard for fighting dogs. Pound for pound, the pit, with its lower pain sensitivity, thicker skin, higher bone density and muscle thickness, and, above all, greater gameness, will destroy any other dog. Rottweilers are bred to be guard dogs—they are big, heavy, and slow, but intimidating, and they are people-aggressive, unlike pits. Pit bulls don’t make good guard dogs, because if they are finally trained to become people-aggressive, they will go for the throat, not the arm or leg. Any dog will fight for a few minutes, but only a pit will go on and on.
Dogfighting is legal in Japan, and there they have a thousand-year-old tradition of fighting the big dogs, the tozas. Those dogs are all over a hundred pounds, big and slow-moving compared to the explosive pit. A really big pit, even one at seventy or eighty pounds, would tear a toza up.
Pits are wonderful pets, and are not inherently dangerous, but their gameness and toughness make them animals that need to be understood, or there can be tragic results. They have been bred specifically to fight other dogs for hundreds of years, like a greyhound has been bred to run. Pit bulls make great pets as long as you know what you’ve got, and you know what you are doing. They’re almost more of a farm animal, an outside animal, and they are very sensitive and intelligent but need a lot of stimulation and attention—especially a “game-bred” pit, in which these characteristics are most defined. The problems happen when pits get left alone too much, or when they are tortured or mistreated. If a pit has been “turned on” to fighting, meaning it has been fought a little, it will want to fight and kill basically any dog it comes into contact with. Ike X said that dogs so aggressive are a fairly recent breeding phenomenon, only since the seventies, as before that puppies used to be allowed to wander the yard. John said, “I had a bitch once named Renegade who would kill a puppy, anything walking, she would jump it—basset hound, Chihuahua, anything.” His dog was a fighting dog, game-bred; and that was how it interacted with the world. I thought of boxers and pro fighters who end up beating their wives. The fighting dog has learned that interaction with the world is through its teeth, and the fighter, sometimes, has learned it is through his fists.
Pit bulls are responsible for so many dog attacks against people mostly because so many dogs are pits; they are in some areas the most popular breed in the United States. The various pounds in the Los Angeles area were killing eight hundred stray pits a week in 1996. They have been bred to fight—and to forget that is foolish—but they are great dogs. I lived with two in Oakland and loved them. They don’t have a “locking jaw,” as some people think, but they do have a powerful bite and, of course, tremendous will to hang on. With an adult pit, you use a “breaking bar” or “stick” to get it to release its bite, by working the bar in and levering its jaw just a little, and then when it lets go to readjust its bite, you pull the dogs apart. John had a young pit bite another dog, and luckily the pit was young enough that when John took the hose and sprayed water right in its eyes, it let go. “He never would have done that if he was a year or two older—he never would have let go,” John said. You have to know what you are doing if you own a pit.
Many game-bred dogs don’t have the big bulkiness and intimidating silhouette of a show pit bull, and it isn’t until they yawn, and you see the massive jaws and huge fangs (sometimes called tusks), like a small lion, that you realize that these aren’t ordinary dogs.
Just like human fighters, dogs have to be conditioned properly before a fight. The program is called “the keep” and runs anywhere from six to thirteen weeks. The keep is strict isolation and a workout program with nutrition and mental conditioning thrown in. It strikes me that the isolation is the real torment for a pack animal; it is part of what makes the dogs so aggressive and must feel like a form of madness. Certainly, human fighters need the isolation and go into camps for weeks or months before a fight, separated from families and women and anything not to do with the fight. I think the isolation must change your brain chemistry, just like a dog’s, and make you more focused, more aggressive. I had heard no sex for three weeks before a fight from a hundred different sources.
This is where the true barbarism of dogfighting lies, in the life on the chain—not in the fight. These dogs are never allowed to be with other dogs, and for so keen a pack animal it must be torture. Especially once they’ve been fought, the dogs can never be allowed in contact with one another, because they’d tear one another to shreds.
The owners put the dogs on an electric treadmill for stamina and a manual treadmill for bursts and strength, and then do all kinds of other exercise, such as bite work, dragging chains, pulling tires. Nutrition is monitored—precisely. As with humans, the goal is to get the biggest possible athlete into the fight at weight. John used to do long sessions, sometimes eight hours a day (just to “peak” a dog), and Tim shook his head when he heard that. “It’s overtraining a dog, just like an athlete. Is the dog going to fight for eight hours? No. At most, he’ll end up fighting three, so why would you train him more than that?” Tim favors shorter, more intense workouts.
In the distant past, cats were used as bait on the treadmill and then given to the dog to kill right before the fight, so the dog would learn that all that work finally paid off. But that isn’t done anymore, and isn’t considered necessary. There are guys who fight their dogs against stray mutts, but that’s “just ignorant,” said Escorrega. “It doesn’t do anything for your dog but get him used to easy fights.”
The fight takes place in a pit, under what’s called “Cajun rules,” which have become the standard all over the world, reflecting the dominance of American-bred dogs. The pit is supposed to be sixteen by sixteen feet square, with a two-and-a-half-foot wall running around it and scratch lines fourteen feet apart. Before the fight, the dogs are washed by either the opposing handler or his second, to make sure that no one has used poison or any chemicals to confuse the other, such as a “bitch in heat” smell, for example. They are even washed in milk, occasionally.
As in boxing or jiu-jitsu, when the dogs fight, anything can happen. Some dogs bite the legs, some switch from back to front, some dogs bite the nose, some the kidneys, others the chest. Chest biters can keep the opponent off, can keep him from walking, but that is considered boring—it’s ugly to watch. Some dogs make a career biting ears. They will sweep each other, and take each other’s back, just like grappling.
The main thing is that if the dog doesn’t want to fight anymore, he can leap out of the ring, or just refuse to continue. The dogs should never die in the pit. The one thing they do die from, if the fight goes very long, is shock and stress, from either a burst heart or failed kidneys.
“Pride is the whole damn thing,” Escorrega said. “Vanity can blind you—your dog is dying, but you won’t let him quit, hoping that he can win.” John said that “a dog should never die of kidney failure—those guys don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s a little like chess: Good players don’t need to get to mate; once someone realizes th