Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, takes issue with my previous post, in which I wrote: "Remember that only a generation or two ago, pit bulls were renowned as 'America's family dog.'"
He promptly e-mails me, saying:
This is a total fiction. There isn't a shred of historical evidence that pit bulls ever amounted to more than 1% of the total U.S. dog population until under 15 years ago, or that they were ever commonly kept as family pets (or indeed by anyone except dogfighters) until then.
Merritt is, in fact, a pit bull himself, so I've learned never to argue a case with him, even if I think I'm right (which I don't in this case). In a subsequent e-mail, he attaches a whole article from his newspaper:
How popular were pit bulls once upon a time?
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:
While few doubt that pit bull terriers have long been bred as fighting dogs, most discussion of pit bull traits or regulation meets claims such as that "The American pit bull terrier and its cousins had a well-deserved reputation as a loyal and trustworthy family pet in the early years of this century," (from canismajor.com), and that "By World War I the American pit bull terrier had became a well loved and desired dog," (from americanpitbullregistry.com).
Newspaper Archive.com now provides a quick way to check the record, via 28.9 million pages of text-searchable microfilmed newspapers from the 18th century to today. This includes the classified dogs-for-sale ads.
ANIMAL PEOPLE recently ran searches on 34 dog breeds and breed types for the years 1900-1950, limiting each search to U.S. newspapers only, and adding the word "dog" to each search to avoid pulling up entries for "husky" football players, St. Bernard the Roman Catholic monk, boxers and pugs who were human prizefighters, etc.
Two breeds hit the NewspaperArchive search engine ceiling of 314,027 mentions, and are asterisked accordingly in the table at right. Huskies in the second quarter of the 20th century were at a peak of popularity, after their heroics in delivering diphtheria serum to Nome over the Iditarod Trail in 1927. St. Bernards appear to have been very popular as well.
The exercise was skewed toward finding more pit bulls rather than fewer, since multiple searches were run to try to find pit bulls under a variety of different names; since searches were not run on every recognized dog breed; since not all mentions of huskies and St. Bernards were returned; and since several always rare breeds such as Basenjis were included in the sample, to establish a lower-end benchmark for comparison with the most popular breeds and breed types.
The sum of pit bull terriers, Staffordshires, and American bulldogs came to 34,770: 1% of the sampling of nearly 3.5 million breed-specific mentions of dogs.
Breed Mentions
Husky 314,027
St. Bernard 314,027
Setter 299,801
Collie 281,258
Poodle 264,301
Boxer 261,086
Spaniel (all) 232,107
Greyhound 209,687
Beagle 204,799
German shepherd 187,843
Retrievers 127,768
Pug 82,374
Dachshund 75,584
Basset hound 63,925
Newfoundland 62,438
Doberman 61,685
Pomeranian 55,469
Whippet 47,252
Pekingese 46,580
Great Dane 46,108
Dalmatian 38,498
Afghan hound 19,956
Jack Russell 19,711
Akita 15,925
Pit bull 19,573
Staffordshire 15,168
American bulldog 29
Mastiff 16,427
English bulldog 11,597
Corgi 13,548
Coonhound 5,819
Basenji 4,896
Malamute 1,050
Rottweiler 672
TOTAL: 3,420,988