Hi everybody. I live in the Toledo, Ohio area, where the local Dog Warden, Tom Skeldon is totally fixated on Pit Bulls, and related breeds. He got his job due to his father and uncle being political big shots in the area, and his brother is warden in Williams county, near the Indiana border.
The law here is totally unreasonable, but it looks like someone has figured out a way to possibly fight it, and maybe declare it unconstitutional. Let's hope. My last dog was a Pit Mix, and happily, lived his entire life with only a few people guessing at his background, so there were no problems with the dog warden and police.
He was probably a Pit/Golden Retreiver, and there may have been some other breed in there too. His sister was grey brindle and white, my dog was Reddish gold and white, with, if you looked really closely, brindle and ticking underneath a lot of hair. He lived 14 and a half years, without ever starting a fight, and has been gone 5 years now.
I have a friend who lives outside our area with a Pit that has slept with his daughter (almost 5 now) pretty much her entire life. She was jumping in and out of the crib without them knowing about it for the first year or so. One night, my friend got up in the middle of the night and couldn't find the dog. He and his wife looked and looked and finally went into the baby's room and there he was, on his back in the crib with the baby, about 11 months old laying up against him. They tried to keep him from going back in there the next night, but both the dog and the baby cried so much, they let him back in. The only "incident" was when the wife's mother showed up at 6am one morning, from the west coast, and ran into the bedroom to see her granddaughter for the first time, and startled both the baby and the dog, who wasn't really pleased about this crazy woman being in the room. Grandma bailed out quick, her idea of a dog was a 7 pound toy poodle, not an 88 pound Pit Bull.
Some people got all hysterical when they heard about the sleeping arrangements, especially Grandma, saying the dog can't be in bed with the baby, etc, he's a Pit and will go nuts and kill her, blah, blah. They ignored them and the dog has slept with her every night, first in the crib (a real feat to get in and out without making any noise, and getting out as soon as the baby cried without getting caught all that time), and now in a regular bed. Yeah, he's a killer all right. The only person who would need to worry about him would be the idiot who tries to kidnap her! He's totally trustworthy with kids, and other dogs too. Cats? No, that's something he will go after..My dogs do that..skunks, possumms, Raccoons, groundhogs, etc, are all fair game in their backyard.