A Blood Sport Exposed – washingtonpost.com

“Dog men,” they call themselves, the untold numbers of breeders and fighters. With their pastime illegal everywhere in the country, they stay in touch through secret networks and underground magazines. They say they love to compete. They tell themselves the pit bulls love it, too.

“The reason for the Michael Vick thing . . . is because athletes have a keen insight into courage and determination, which is what pit bulls possess,” said Bill Stewart, a breeder in Romance, Ark., who publishes the Pit Bull Reporter. “Athletes understand better than anyone what dogfighting is about. It’s about two highly conditioned athletes going at each other with everything they have to try to win. It’s the purest form of combat on earth.”

To dog men, all dogs are curs except the American pit bull terrier, descended from canines used in English blood sports centuries ago.

Animal-protection workers and others who have infiltrated the underworld of pit bull fighting say dog men train their animals for weeks before bouts, perverting the dietary and fitness sciences to build ferocious canine maulers.

They perform unlicensed veterinary surgery on the grievously wounded and stud their battle-scarred champs, often for fees in the hundreds of dollars. A pit bull in its prime with a string of victories can fetch $10,000 or more. To save on upkeep and preserve the breed, weaklings are destroyed, either painlessly or with a vengeance.

The illegal bouts, in carpeted 16-by-16-foot pits surrounded by four-foot walls, are staged in hidden venues, usually with no more than a few dozen spectators allowed. Elaborate, decades-old rules are followed. Bets are posted in cash, sometimes five figures. Afterward, dog men tend to their pit bulls’ injuries, provided the animals fought gamely. They won’t tolerate dogs that quit.

Young pit bulls that survive training become “match dogs,” weighing 35 to 55 pounds and fighting in weight classes. With a pile of cash riding on the outcome, a regulation match is officiated by a referee. A typical bout lasts 45 minutes to an hour, usually ending when one of the bloodied combatants is too torn and gouged to go on.

Dog men have too much invested in their animals to let them fight to the death, so fatalities in the pit are rare. But grave, disfiguring wounds are the norm.

“At the top level, there are probably several thousand guys,” said John Goodwin, manager of animal-fighting issues for the Humane Society of the United States. “When you include the guys who are part of organized dogfighting but don’t have quite as sophisticated an operation as we saw in Surry County, we’re talking about upwards of 40,000.” …

About 15 years ago, after it became fashionable in the urban thug life to be seen with a menacing pit bull, spur-of-the-moment street fights became common. [One gang member strutting with his nasty pit bull sees another, egos swell, and soon they’re in a vacant building, the dogs ripping into each other while still on leash chains. “Street fighting,” these impromptu bouts are called.]

In this realm, to train them, owners often whip their pit bulls, burn them with cigarettes, feed them gunpowder and jalapeño peppers until they turn unremittingly vicious. Authorities said a dog man’s pit bulls normally are safe for people to handle, while a street dog usually will attack anything that moves, except the “alpha male” who abused it. …

Because urban pit bull fights usually are spontaneous, police said, making arrests is difficult unless owners are caught in the act. Based on the dozens of battered and scarred pit bulls abandoned or seized in the Washington area every year, however, animal-protection advocates say street fighting is common. …

Generally, the process of turning a well-bred pit bull pup into a fighter begins when the dog is 16 months old, said Sakach, who witnessed a dozen organized dogfights as an undercover investigator in the 1980s and 1990s. He now trains enforcement agencies on how to root out dog men.

The “prospect” is pitted in bouts against an over-the-hill fighter in the kennel, sometimes with filed-down teeth, a dog unable to do much damage.

“These are short combats, about 10 to 15 minutes,” said Sakach, “during which the prospect is going to get lots and lots of lavish praise. The point is, you want the dog to start associating praise with what its master wants it to do, which is fight.”

After a few months, this “schooling” process turns deadly serious, as the dog begins preparing for its “game test,” a full-fledged bout with a kennel-mate in its prime, to measure how much punishment the young pit bull can take. The prospect trains for six to eight weeks, hour upon hour — running, swimming, jumping, chomping — until test day arrives.

“The idea here is, you want your prospect to get hurt,” Sakach said. “You don’t want it hurt so bad that it’s going to die. But you want it hurt badly enough so that it really understands pain and exhaustion. Because you want to know if your dog’s going to quit.”

For a prospect that fails, life is short. “If they’re not going to make money for you,” Sakach said, “then you don’t want them around.”
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