My Good Buddy



Chief is the best dog $39 could buy.  I picked him up at the Burlington County Animal Shelter in Mt. Holly about five years ago, shortly after my Rottweiler mix died.  He is a pit bull and weighs in at 110 pounds.

When I got Chief about five years ago, my other dog bull just died of a heart attack.  He was 11 years old and also had lupus.  He was a German Shepard-Rottweiler mix.  The shelter had a Rottweiler listed on petfinder, but when I went to pet him he damn near took my hand off on three separate occasions.  No way am I putting something like that in my car without a cage.

So I looked around and found a whole bunch of pit bulls and selected one of the largest two in the pound.  The other one looked similar to Chief.  He was a little bigger and and a brown and white pattern rather than liver and white.  He was friendly enough with a little girl who was feeding him dog biscuits, but he growled at me.  Chief on the other hand licked my hand and wanted to come home.

When I hooked a leash up to him he dragged me across the kennel.  He pulls like a train.  That's how he got the name Chief.  When I got him home he wanted to kill my wife's two cats.  He still can't be around cats.  When the dogcatcher caught him, he was wandering around loose in Willingboro.  I believe he survived by eating small animals like cats and squirrels.  I get the same kind of reaction off of him when he sees a cat as when he sees a squirrel.  He pulls real hard and wants to kill it.

You probably heard one of two things about pits.  Either they are born killers or they are the most wonderful pets in the world.  Those who take the second point of view say "its all how you raise them".

The truth is somewhere in between.

I had to get Chief neutered because he was too wild in his natural state.  He'd jump on my truck's hood and run across the top of it.  He left some nasty scratches in the paint.  He also would leap over my 4 foot chain link fence like a racehorse.  I'd see him in front of my house when I came home from work.  He knew when it was dinner time.  He tried to kill another dog at the dog park.  He beelined across the fence and attacked my neighbor's pit bull.

After he was neutered he calmed down a lot.  I keep him inside mostly and he has a loving home where he gets petted a lot and gets all the food he wants.  Fact of the matter is though, these dogs were bred to kill other dogs and they can turn downright mean if they don't like something.

Besides playing, eating and occasionally fighting, Pit Bulls like nothing better than to chew.  Better get them some cattle bones, or they just might take their frustrations out on your furniture.  My furniture has been spared so far.  Can't say the same for the cattle bones.

Cattle bones are better known as Pit Bull Toothpicks in my house.  After downing a rump roast or some other treat, my pit likes to work out his jaws on a nice hard bone.  Since a pit can clamp down with 2,500 pounds per square inch of force, the bones don't stand a chance.  A pit bull's bite is almost as powerful as that of an alligator.  Pits are capable of shattering the long bones of a human and are an excellent home defense tool.