Colleen Lynn’s favorite journalist, if not the infamously inaccurate Merritt Clifton, has got to be Barbara Kay. Not so coincidentally Barbara Kay almost exclusively references “statistics” from Lynn’s anti-Pit Bull website, DogsBite.org. These are statistics that Lynn has either already gotten from Merritt Clifton, or has gathered herself using Clifton’s tactics of selectivity. Imagine that! Mr. Clifton derives his Pit Bull vilification “statistics” from selectively plucking information from media reports, and putting the faulty premise of cherry-picking through unverifiable data aside, I’d just note that media reports have proven to be quite unreliable when referencing incidents involving dogs and dog breeds.
Still, the bias is heavy. All 3 of these folks have got an unmistakeable ax to grind with any dog that they’ve deemed to be a Pit Bull. Like the sun rising every morning, Lynn and Clifton continue to maintain a hateful bias against millions of dogs, and it’s based solely on how those dogs appear to them and nothing else. Barbara Kay is a follower of such imbecility.
Speaking of bias, this brings me to confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is basically the act of surrounding yourself with people that serve to reinforce what you already think. This tendency is at the foundation of those who philosophically follow Colleen Lynn and her fraudulent “public safety” website, a website that pays no attention to actual ways of improving public safety. Like I mentioned earlier, it amounts to not much more than a hub for a delusional hate group whose life work is based around scapegoating entire groups of undefinable dogs. You can see it for yourself by simply observing how many of these individuals conduct themselves online. For example, try commenting out of tune on one of their Facebook pages and you will be instantly banned for not striking the expected tone.
I’d advise the anti-dog crowd to step out of the darkness of anonymity and engage someone every once and awhile who’s not a shill for their entrenched beliefs. If they’re so confident in their interpretations then that should be an expected next step, right? I’d happily invite any of them onto the Bull Horn podcast, even all 3 of them at the same time. This invitation will continue to stand for whenever they’d want to accept it. But moving on…
On Monday Barbara Kay said, which was then echoed by Colleen Lynn, that “if you can only love a Pit Bull, you don’t really love dogs.” Woosah! First off, that standalone statement is a complete misrepresentation of most people’s feelings. How many people do you know that love only Pit Bulls? What? For Heaven’s sake, “Pit Bulls,” as most people speak of them, are mostly dogs who’ve been mixed amongst many differing breeds. That alone negates the stupidity of such a statement. But breed identification aside, I literally do not know of a single person that has shown or stated Kay’s sentiment to be even remotely accurate. Let me repeat, I know not 1 person who would fit that characterization!
See, this is the backwardness of their arguments and the emptiness of their attempts at framing rhetoric. Pit Bull-owning people are just like any other dog owner, just as Pit Bulls and mixes are just dogs. Every single day this is proven in millions of instances, none of which garner any media attention. Pit Bull owners do not love only Pit Bulls. They do not dislike other dogs. Reality would show the opposite to be true, and almost entirely across the board. Of course, there will always be negative outliers to any positive observation, as a certain percentage of people will always exist from all walks of life. But with that, bad individuals, in any realm, do not serve to spoil the entire group of millions of categorized individuals. Further, Pit Bull owners are not fragmented persons from the rest of society. Those claims are total lies and misrepresentations meant to plant seeds of hostility and divide dog owners against themselves. Such inaccuracies are obviously what dog-haters like Colleen Lynn want uninvolved people to think, but these notions will routinely fall flat upon any type of examination.
Instead, it’s the cult of DogsBite.org that’s built upon the premise of the “only.” They routinely only focus on begrudging the Pit Bull, filling their obsessive existences with vilifying the self-defined “only” factions of both the dog and people populations. It’s all prejudicially argumentative at its core, and that’s clear as day. These attempts being always based in trying to project upon society that Pit Bulls are not dogs and that Pit Bull owners do not care about any other dog or person. Both concepts are extremely false and 100% unproven at any level. Yet they will go back to these claims time and time again because using a broad brush to incite irrational fear is literally the only leg that they have to stand on.
In Barbara Kay’s latest article, referenced above, I counted a whopping 22 separate instances where she made a Pit Bull-specific claim that in actuality goes unsubstantiated. This is appalling and embarrassing and pathetic. But still not surprising, coming from a woman who in 2012 wrote that Pit Bull owners were purposely “fetishizing” dogs “bred for blood sport and savaging slaves.”
On the same day that Kay put out her latest anti-Pit Bull rant, Merritt Clifton put out a ludicrous piece entitled “Hitler’s Pit Bull.” Yes, you read that right.
This insane diatribe basically implies that since (more appropriately if) Hitler allegedly had a dog that Clifton calls a Pit Bull, then that must prove that Pit Bulls are universally evil… Um, okay guy! That’s the stupidest fucking thing that I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Impressively done.
Clifton goes on to claim that Hitler had this dog from 1915-1917, which, just for the record, was years before he even entered into politics and 22 years prior to the start of World War II. Comically there was no effort made by Clifton to demonize German Shepherds, who Hitler consistently owned throughout his reign of Nazi terror. And that’s not to say that his owning of German Shepherds was a bad thing, as it doesn’t reflect a single thing about any individual dog being bad, or further, about an entire breed or type of dogs being bad. I’m simply using his vague asshatery against him.
In an incredible dose of irony Clifton then ends his poop fest with this…
Though Hitler’s maniacal hatred, paranoia and obsession were already becoming self-evident, the loss of his dog and subsequent gassing may have contributed to his desire to scapegoat others.
The scapegoating Merritt Clifton can diagnose a scapegoating Adolf Hitler? Too rich.
In closing, Clifton’s writing shows how incredibly lame his attempts at demonization are. He spends most of his article trying to discredit Sergeant Stubby, timelining the dog’s existence as if he was there, and then arguing over which breed he was or wasn’t. He then states that one of history’s most wretched human beings had many dogs, but only opts to focus on 1 of them. Again, he diagnoses the dog’s breed through a picture and then states emphatically that this time it is a Pit Bull, imagine that! He then uses his claim as proof that a certain type of dog is evil. Really, man? Good grief. Speaking again of irony, these repugnant people are the same folks that want to do to Pit Bulls what the Nazis did to the Jews. Just saying.