Although this story is a couple of years old, it clearly
represents the mentality of the type of people who have turned
the pitbull from one of America's most revered breeds to one of
the most hated!
"These are not normal dogs," says Tyler Eison, gazing
reverently at a litter of seven-week-old pit bull puppies. "I
like having very vicious, angry dogs. I'm going to teach them
not to like other dogs. I'm going to agitate them, make them
aggressive. That way when it's about business, they are going
to be serious."
As a real estate investor and auto dealer, Eison, 41,
values aggression in his dogs for protecting both himself
and his property. "My dogs are my pistols," he says,
cracking a gold-tooth smile. "I have my dogs on my
property, and I have faith in them. If they're coming at
you, you have to shoot them to kill them."
Tough people want tough dogs, but if you want a truly
vicious dog you have to create it yourself. With his latest
litter of three girls and a boy, Eison is trying to
re-create a bloodline of fighting dogs he owned 20 years
ago (though he insists his fighting days are long over).
He's making a stud dog out of his prized companion Rock, an
eerily silent pit bull with a golden brown coat and pink
nose. Rock's first litter was born in early May, and Eison
watched its progress daily to see which of the puppies
would develop more of their father's traits.
Eison kennels the pups in a fenced-in corner of his
backyard, in a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes in
St. Albans, Queens. When the dogs get older, he'll move
them to another house nearby, where his wife and
stepchildren live, and where he keeps his adult dogs—a Cane
Corso and three pit bulls—in large pens out back. He has
three more dogs, two Cane Corsos and a Rottweiler, at
friends' houses.
Hoping to turn Rock's offspring into deadly weapons,
Eison started antagonizing them when they were around nine
weeks old. One afternoon he held an all-brown puppy by its
midsection and for several minutes forced it to lie across
the neck of one its sisters, who Eison believes might be
the pick of the litter. Eison didn't think the brown pup
was willing enough to play rough, so he decided to force it
into a scrum. After a minute or so, its sister became angry
and began to growl and bite the brown one's ears. After the
incident the brown puppy cowered under a metallic-blue
racing motorcycle Eison keeps in the backyard and peed.
Eison's love for pit bulls goes back to his childhood.
At nine years old, he was spending the night at his
grandparents' house when a heater caught fire. Eison was
asleep on the couch; the family's pit bull mix nipped him
on the leg until he woke up and roused his grandparents,
saving their lives. The dog had been feral, Eison says, but
people in the neighborhood paid top dollar for her
puppies.
Ten years later, in the late '80s, Eison's car was
rear-ended. An argument erupted as two men leapt out of the
other car. One of them said he was going to get something
out of his trunk. Eison guessed this something was a gun,
so he wasted no time in loosing Conan on him. "I wasn't
going to let him kill me, so my dog took care of him," he
remembers. "I sicced my dog on that guy, man, and beat the
other one up myself. I had no choice."
Eison's belief that his dogs offer essential protection
in his sometimes rough neighborhood was only reinforced
last month when his stepson Glen Moore, 22, was hit in the
head with a baseball bat in Howard Beach, in what
authorities are calling a bias crime. The attack, says
Eison, never would have happened if Moore had had one of
the dogs with him.
Basically purebred mutts, pit bulls were developed from
the crossbreeding of bull- and bear-baiting dogs with
terriers used in rat-baiting competitions. The result was a
canine with the tremendous jaw pressure of a bulldog and
the athleticism and ferocity of a terrier, which kills its
prey by grabbing it in its mouth and whipping it from side
to side. With his bloodline, Eison is trying to emphasize
the violence of a terrier's bite, while losing nothing of a
pit bull's agility and intelligence. He has mated Rock with
an all-white English bull terrier named Lady. The result,
he hopes, will be dogs of 45 to 50 pounds that can more
than hold their own against dogs twice their size. He'll
mate the best female of this first litter with her father.
This inbreeding—called linebreeding—will help Eison isolate
the traits he seeks.
Studies have suggested that pit bulls are not inherently
dangerous. In evaluations by the American Temperament
Testing Society, the pit bull passed at a rate of 83.4
percent, just below the beloved golden retriever and 4.5
points higher than the collie. That said, the city's
shelters reported that almost 6,000 bull breeds (pit bulls
and pit bull mixes) were admitted in the last fiscal year.
Though they represent 37 percent of all dogs in city
shelters, bull breeds accounted for almost half of the
7,136 dogs euthanized in shelters last year. Pit bulls are
routinely adopted, but shelter officials say a
disproportionate number can't be because they haven't been
socialized properly. Some have spent their whole lives in
cages.
Ed Boks, the director of New York City Animal Care &
Control, says the blame for pit bulls' negative image is
shared equally by the press—which is fascinated by pit bull
attacks—and breeders who take advantage of the dogs. "Pit
bulls are actually a rather stable breed," says Boks. "The
thing about pit bulls is that they are stuck with this bad
reputation. They are extraordinarily loyal and loving
animals and they will fight to the death just to please
you."
At two months old, Eison's puppies are more concerned
with fighting their way out of the old paint bucket he is
bathing them in. "All of these dogs have good tempers,"
Eison says over the sound of splashing water and the din of
the LIRR train speeding past his backyard on elevated
tracks. "These dogs were born to fight, but they have the
potential to be the sweetest dogs. This one is just like
his dad—he's one of the most playful dogs, but when it
comes down to business, he'll get down."
Unlike his father, though, the puppy hates baths. When
he's freed from Eison's soapy clutches he chases his
sisters, wrestling with them in the muddy corners of the
yard, swiftly undoing Eison's efforts to keep them clean.
He establishes a dominant position so his sisters can't
flee and bites on their ears, eliciting hoarse, juvenile
yelps and showing signs of what he might one day be capable
of.
After Eison bathes them, he force-feeds his dogs a
deworming solution. The puppies stagger around coughing and
trying to spit up, as Eison tries to keep track of which
ones he has given the medicine to. Next he cleans their
pen, refills their water buckets, and gives them fresh
food. As he works, the puppies try to enter the house
through a screen door with a broken latch and force their
way into Eison's recently scrubbed back porch, from there
into his meticulously kept two-story house. When he opens
the door to expel one puppy, two more charge in. They will
never be allowed to stay inside, just as they will never be
taught to roll over or give him a high five or fetch his
slippers.
People have always selectively bred and trained dogs to
emphasize certain traits, says ASPCA animal behaviorist
Steve Zawistowski. Aggression, he says, can be bred out
just as it can be bred in. "We've selected dogs that
represent human aspects of caring and friendliness and
compassion," said Zawistowski. "With pit bulls, we've
created a dog that combines loyalty with instances of
intense aggression. The dog now represents an edgy part of
our society." Which is evidenced, he says, by the names
people give them.
Dogs like Rock and Conan (now deceased) are so accurate
a reflection of Eison's mentality that he wants all the
others to aspire to their temperament. He considers them
members of his family. "If you don't have any children, you
don't stay on this earth. But if you have children you're
always here. So I'm going to make Rock live forever," he
says.
At 12 weeks, the brown puppy was still unwilling to play
rough. Eison initially liked him because he looked like his
father, Rock, but he remained smaller and more timid than
his littermates. Eison says Lady, the puppy's mother, would
have killed the runt herself if he hadn't intervened. Eison
says he sold him for $2,000 to a friend. About a month
later he sold a second puppy for another $2,000, keeping
only the most aggressive boy and girl for himself.
“They will fight to the death
just to please you.”
photo: Anthony J. Causi. |
While backyard breeders aren't necessarily doing
anything illegal, shelter officials blame them for the
abundance of homeless bull breeds, many of them unstable.
On a recent visit to shelters in Brooklyn and Manhattan
about half of the dogs in custody were pits or pit mixes.
The dogs escape from yards, slip away when their masters
aren't watching them, or end up in shelters when their
owners are arrested or evicted, according to Brooklyn
Animal Care supervisor Joyce Clemmons. When the owners come
to retrieve their animals they usually don't mention that
they're breeders until she brings up the city policy of
mandatory fixing of all dogs in city shelters before
they're released. The potential financial loss is not the
only reason some owners object. "The men always say,
'You're taking my manhood away.' We get that every week.
They say that they can't walk the dog in their neighborhood
anymore because people will see that his testicles are
gone. They are adamant about it," Clemmons says.
As he sits at the conference table in his storefront
real estate office, Eison agrees it would be embarrassing
to be seen with a neutered dog. On this early summer
afternoon, his wife, Chandra, is in the office using the
phone and fax machine to wrangle with the Crime Victims
Board over her son Glen's case. The walls are covered with
portraits of black leaders. A placard on Eison's desk
reads, "Relax, God's in charge." Eison takes a Popsicle
break and attempts to debunk the logic of mandatory
neutering and spaying at city shelters. "Their opinion is
that we shouldn't breed, but at the same time they
shouldn't be so quick to spay dogs, to take away what God
gave them." Dogs are like cars or clothes, he says; people
want name brands, not the kind of generic dog you can get
at a shelter. With his dogs, people will know they're
getting a high-caliber product. He says his bloodline is
the Mercedes-Benz of dog breeds.
Because he is the only one who can handle his dogs and
because his family is spread all over Queens, Eison is in
perpetual motion between his office and two houses, and his
multiple responsibilities generally have him running late
for appointments. In early August, when the puppies were
three and a half months old, Eison moved them to his main
kennel, adjacent to the older dogs, eliminating some of the
runaround. Now he can tend to all of them during breaks
from work. When the kennels have been scrubbed, the feces
removed, and water bowls cleaned, Eison, drenched in sweat,
removes his T-shirt—revealing a heart-shaped tattoo on his
chest with the name "Chandra" in the middle.
After letting the puppies cool off in the spray from the
garden hose, he decides to separate them rather than return
them to the same pen. A veterinarian friend has cropped
both puppies' ears, and the girl's left ear is healing
slowly from too much rough play. Meanwhile, she has left
the less aggressive boy with nicks and bite marks on his
neck. The older dogs won't make good kennelmates either, as
the girl puppy spends her time pacing back and forth,
mirroring the movements of the pit bulls in the pen next to
her, trying to bite them but coming up with a mouthful of
chain-link fencing. "That girl's real crazy; she likes to
play games with the big dogs. She wants to fight
everything," says Eison. She'll be the one he'll breed with
her father, Rock.
"Rock is real good off the leash," says Eison. "He only
kills when I tell him to kill." To demonstrate this Eison
has to put King, the Cane Corso, into a cage, because he
doesn't get along with Rock. Before doing so, Eison points
out two large scars—one behind the left ear and another on
the left foreleg—on the 160-pound King where Rock got hold
of him.
Indeed Rock is good off the leash, wagging his tail and
letting people he doesn't know pet him. He's good off the
leash, that is, until Eison shows him a stuffed toy. When
Rock sees the toy—a plush Sylvester the cat doll, dressed
in a nightshirt and cap—his muscles stiffen, his tail stops
wagging, and he assumes the posture of a pointer. Eison
holds Rock by a short leash and hands the toy to a third
party.
"Watch him now, watch him now," says Eison to Rock in a
gruff, deliberate voice, periodically jerking the leash. He
lets him charge a foot or two toward the doll before
yanking him back. It only takes a couple of passes of the
toy before Rock is able to grab it. But it is not the toy
he's after. He immediately drops it and stares with
terrifying intensity at the person who had been holding it.
"Rock's bloodline is one of the best. He doesn't want to
stop, he'll fight to the death," says Eison. "You'll never
be able to come in this backyard again."
This is the reason why thousands of pit bulls are killed
every years, why people are bitten and mauled, why people get
into dog fighting and why the pit bull, a breed can be a
wonderful and loving dog, had the rep of vicious killer!!
While
thousands and thousands of people work hard everyday to
turn around the reputation of pit bulls and rehabilitate
them and raise them into the wonderful, loving and caring
dogs they can be, Tyler Eison works hard everyday to breed
and turn his pit bull puppies into vicious killers!!
