Don't Ban Petey!

Using the Media

by Gerard Spicer

As I discussed the various options with Alex we both agreed that we wanted to do more then just email the city council members to show our support of pit bulls. We also agreed that we did not want to stage any type of protest. We are both conservative in our ideology and any sort of protest would probably be a last resort. I told Alex that the problem is that people are not being educated towards the positive aspects of pit bulls. On one side we have owners and animal lovers who are passionately on the side of pits bulls, and on the other we have people who are passionately against pit bulls, primarily do to the fact that they have not heard anything positive about the dogs. What we needed I told Alex was to get out positive news about the breed. But the question was how we could do this.

I decided to put my feelings for pit bulls down in words in a story about the positive aspects of the breed. The story I planned to email to members of the council. I wanted to focus the majority of the article on the solid history of the breed and show that it was only in the recent history of the breed that pit bulls have received their preserved bad reputation. Unknown to most people the pit bull was at one time considered the “all-American dog” and was the most respected dog in the U.S. The pit bull represented American in patriot posters in both the world wars and a pit bull by the name of Stubby became the most decorated dog soldier in U.S. military history. Pit bulls were so well thought of at one time that they appeared three times on the cover of Life magazine. This was the positive image of the pit bull that I wanted to convey to my council members. I wanted to remind them of the “Little Rascals” and how a gang of mischievous kid with their pit bull Petey entertained an entire nation.

What meant to be a short summary of the positive history of the breed turned into quite a long essay that detailed the beginnings of the breed’s conception, through the dog’s golden years, and up to today’s controversies surrounding the pit bull. I emailed the finished story entitled “A Fall from Grace: the Story of the Pit Bull” to the council members with the hope that it would perhaps shed some positive light on the breed that they might have been unaware of. I passed the story around to friends and family and received some good feedback. I posted the story on the Rocky Mountain News / Your Hub website and a few days later I was contacted by a journalist who wanted to print the story in an insert of the Denver Post. I was told that the norm was to print stories of 400-600 words but my story was 3,000 words; however, they liked the story enough to suggest printing it in a four or five part series. They wanted to put a rush on the story to coincide with the first city council study session on the pit bull issue so I provided them with some additional photos and other information they were requesting.

Two days before the council meeting I emailed the story to Channel 7 News, a local ABC affiliate in Denver. An hour later I received a phone call from channel 7 saying that they could have a crew at my house in twenty minutes. I told them I would be more then happy to do an interview on the pit bull issue. Twenty minutes later a crew from Channel 7 showed up at my house comprising of an investigative reporter, a cameraman, and an intern. My dog Petey gets extremely excited when company comes over to the house. It was a funny thing to watch, as Petey could not stop licking the crew. They could not get over how friendly Petey was, not just for a pit bull, but also for a dog in general. We did the interview with Petey, an eighty-pound pit bull, sitting on my lap. Later that night I watch the interview on the 10 pm newscast. The interview came across very good and showed a side of the pit bull most people do not get to see: a fun loving, affectionate, family pet. The next morning a received a phone call from a reporter at the Rocky Mountain News who had watched the newscast and wanted to do an interview with me, later the same day I was contacted by the Denver post and a local newspaper the Lakewood Sentinel (who also agreed to print my story in full). That evening I emailed all the local news outlets to let them know that I would be at the council meeting on Monday and that I would also be bringing my pit bull Petey and a gang of supporters

 

When BSL came to our community we decided to do something about it. This is our story.