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| The Bambino learned the hard way about the danger of pit bulls and switched to a watered down pit fighter. |
February 6, 1895 - August 16, 1948
Babe Ruth is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player of all time but few realize that The Babe is also found among the ranks of famous pit bull owners. The Babe's pit bull hobby didn't last long. He retired from pit bull ownership when he learned the hard way that it was much harder to keep pit bulls safely contained on his property than it was to knock the ball out of the park.
“The farm definitely had become more nuisance than nirvana. An adventure raising chickens had fallen apart when the chickens died. A second adventure, raising pit bulls was disbanded when one of the dogs got out of its pen and attacked and killed a neighbor’s cow.”
page195 The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, Leigh Montville
"Ruth used to tell his wife he was going fishing, then come home tipsy, carrying a store-bought fish still wrapped in paper. The day his neighbor Henry Ford (who wanted to build an industrial village in town) complained that Ruth's pit bulls had killed his chickens, Ruth went to the barn, and "all Dorothy heard was shotgun blasts as he killed every dog."
http://www.thehistoryhound.com/babe-ruth-piano.html
Young Babe Ruth: His Early Life and Baseball Career from the Memoirs of a Xaverian Brother, Brother Gilbert
ReplyDeletehey..... babe ruth may have been a pitter but he saw sense in the end . pitter maybe , but definitely not a nutter .
ReplyDeleteperhaps his neighbors wouldnt have agreed with me about babe not being a nutter . still , i have respect the mans solution to his own dogs marauding natures.
Ruth realized that his dogs were a hazard to his neighbors and he took direct action to solve the problem. I have no problem with this. Ruth loved dogs and it couldn't have been easy to shoot his own. An honorable and responsible choice.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you Snarky "pitter maybe, but definitely not a nutter."
i think there are degrees of pit nutterdom. ruth was definitely on the low end. he had pit dogs on his property that he knew posed a danger or he wouldn't have told his daughter to stay away from them. and if these historical accounts are accurate, there were at least 2 separate killing incidents before he wised up and got out of the pit bull biz.
ReplyDeleteit is not difficult to imagine him being attracted to mutants after i read about his recklessness in his private life: reckless and excessive behaviors in the areas of women, booze, food, spending... the baseball teams viewed him as too irresponsible to hire for manager positions.
Seems odd that a child would be forbidden to go near nannydogs...
ReplyDelete