Pit Nutter True Confessions: My "Service Dog," Boulder, Tried to Kill My Neighbor's Kid

       I have a confession to make: I read the pit bull forums from time to time.  They are a wealth of information, and let me tell you, it's incredible what these people talk about amongst themselves.  I find the interesting threads by searching for things like "my dog attacked me," "my dog killed another dog," "sued by neighbor," "go to court," "my dog killed my other dog," "afraid of my dog," and "my dog bit me/my child/neighbor." The stories!

           Well, I recently came across one that I felt I had to share.  It deserves, I feel, a greater audience than the pitbull-forum echo chamber.

         Where to begin....?  The frightening, serious, narrowly avoided attack on the neighbor's tiny boy?  The fact that this pit bull was "deliberately chosen" by the owner to be a (fake) "service dog" for her autistic daughter, and presumably passed off as a legitimate service dog in public?  That the owner carefully and deliberately obfuscated the reason her dangerous "service dog" had to be put to sleep, out of a desire to escape the "judgement" of others, and protect the image and reputation of pit bulls?  That several of her nutter friends in the forum chime in to admit that they've had to euthanize their dangerous pit bulls in the past? It goes on and on.  Let's take a look:

          First, meet "jaxcullen," the owner of a pit bull named Boulder.  Jaxcullen begins the thread with her story: her 16-month old "autism service dog" hit puberty and turned on right on schedule, becoming "increasingly aggressive to everything" except the members of her immediate family.  Boulder just scared the shit out of her by going after her neighbor's little boy as he walked beside the fence: 

     "The boy was making NO threatening behavior whatsoever.  He wasn't making noises or in any kind of posture that would say he was a threat.  Wasn't walking too slow or running.  Boulder charged him.  I am so very grateful he was on his lead.  It's the only thing that stopped him from attacking the boy.  He was totally fine one moment, and then he just erupted.  He charged and hit the boards so hard, I thought he broke them..Even after I had him by the collar, he still was acting like the by was the only thing he saw.  He was in a frenzy."

          Jaxcullen sounds sincerely confused in this post, wondering why on earth Boulder would do such a thing:  "Boulder's seen him a million times.  He's my son's size, so why that didn't transfer to him that this size human is not a threat, I'll never know."   I am not an expert in pit bull psychology, lady, but the answer seems completely self-evident to me: Boulder didn't see that kid as a threat in any way.  Even a pit bull is not STUPID enough to find a familiar, helpless 5-year-old human minding his own business THREATENING.  Boulder saw the kid as easy, tasty, obvious prey.  Yum yum, Jaxcullen.

          To her credit, Jaxcullen knows immediately what she has to do: Boulder must be put down as quickly as possible.  She doesn't try to weasel out of this painful decision, or minimize Boulder's lethal potential.  Boulder's gotta die.  She says she would have shot him on the spot, but since the man of the house, Frank, is on probation (gosh, what a shocker! A felon with a pit bull!  Never seen that one before!), there are no longer guns in the household.  Frank had to surrender them.  So, Jaxcullen immediately books Boulder a date with the vet for the needle.

     Jaxcullen spends a restless night tortured by questions about why Boulder turned out the way that he did, and what, if anything, she could have done about it.  My favorite: "Once the hindsight vision set in last night and we discussed his traits now that he's matured, I was able to really accept this is a dog that was bred to be a very dangerous dog.  If I lived alone in a place no one ever visited, he and I would live out our years blissfully together.  For me...for my kids who he adores...he's the most wonderful dog in the world.  For all others, he is a significant threat, and I can't stand the idea of having this knowledge now, having the thoughts today of what he would've done had the lead not stopped him. DA, I can handle/manage...even HA to an extent...an unprovoking child that isn't a stranger to him?  No way."  

  

           What I want to know is, how does Jaxcullen keep her head from exploding from cognitive dissonance? All three of these thoughts somehow occupy the same space in her brain: "Boulder was bred to be a very dangerous dog," "Boulder would never hurt me or my children" "This very dangerous dog is an excellent candidate for service dog to an autistic child."  I think I broke my fucking brain just typing that.  

      

            The reason Jaxcullen can think these things is because she's drunk the nutter kool-aid.  Jaxcullen here is the definition of an ideologue.  

       Here, Jaxcullen says that the first vet she called refused to put Boulder to sleep because he was healthy.  Jaxcullen has to call another one.  Again, to her credit, she knows that he must die and not be surrendered to some "idiot advocacy agency that thinks they can rehabilitate him."  

           Here, Jaxcullen spends Boulder's last day on earth with him and tries to make it a good one.  Final photos, special treats, she is very sad.  I would be touched if I did not believe that Boulder would eventually maim or kill this woman or a member of her household if she kept him alive. 

           But already, in the back of her mind, she is preparing herself for the judgement of others, and what they would think and say about Boulder and why he must be put to sleep:  "I can already see the judgement that will come my way from the unknowing, as if crating is bad or caused this or as if I didn't work with him enough.  That part kind of sucks....".   I guess that's what she calls people who just won't understand the circumstances of her predicament, or something: "the unknowing."  

         This is when the thread takes a shocking, grotesque turn: her nutter forum buddies start chiming in, offering moral support and personal stories of having had similar experiences with their own pit bulls!

           This guy "still cries" about having to dirt nap his pit, Baloo: "This situation is sucky and I wish it didn't have to happen, but it does.  No matter what others say, it had to happen."

         This crazy asshole admits that he has "been through this same situation...more than once, in fact."  Incredibly, he goes on to assert that "any APBT with a correct temperament for the breed" would be as loving and patient with the autistic daughter as Boulder is.

        Jaxcullen responds with more jaw-dropping nutter speak: "Quite true, and the reason I sought out the breed in the first place for her service dog...this experience hasn't deterred us, and both Frank and I agree, we'll only ever have bull breeds in our home, even still."

        How emotionally entrenched in pit bull advocacy and its myths do you have to be to not see this terrifying near-mauling experience as a wake-up call?  

      More nutters chime in to commiserate about having to put their dangerous, aggressive pit bulls to sleep.  Apparently, none of them think there is anything shockingly wrong with the big picture, here.  None of them seem to think this is very weird, much less unacceptable and abnormal canine behavior, or a bizarre dog-owning experience.  

          Some rescue nutter: "It never gets easier for us we are crushed everthing (sic) a trip to the vet becomes clear with one of our guys.  But to truly save the breeds we love....we know that there is no other choice."

          Another nutter, Nala Barone: "I too had to do the unthinkable to our 2 yr old pit mix was DA and we managed this as best we could, however...our Luca became HA.  I couldn't imagine him ever hurting or biting anyone-but he did bite my neighbor.  We..tried for awhile to seclude him/manage him and couldn't imagine him ever hurting one of us but something snapped in him and he could not recover."  I wonder what Luca finally did after he "snapped" that scared this nutter badly enough to change his mind?

         Yet ANOTHER nutter: "Been there once and it wasn't an easy decision, but I made the right one."  All of these jerks have been through this, and they all still choose to own pit bulls!

      Jaxcullen thanks everyone for their support during this difficult time.  Then she shares the statement she intends to make to the "general public" about why Boulder is put to sleep:  "Boulder had a genetic condition that had begun to present over the past several months, had a significant increase over these past few weeks, and would've only progressed worse as time went on."  

        No fucking mention of the fact that Boulder tried to eat the little boy.  No mention of danger or aggression, even though she had previously admitted to herself that he was "bred to be a very dangerous dog."  None of that.  Just this great big obfuscation, this lie by omission.  Why?  So that it "keeps his memory focused on all the beautiful things he was for us instead of the storm that began inside him over these past few months."  

     

          In other words: to respect his memory (why?) and to protect the reputation and public image of pit bulls, and to avoid facing the scrutiny and questions of others, "the unknowing," who might question her about her parenting decision to make a  lethal animal a "service dog" for her disabled child.  Jaxcullen has egg on her face, and she doesn't want anyone to focus on it for long. 

      And last, but certainly not least, we have the final entry to this kicker of a forum thread.  It's a shocking ending right out of a horror movie: the scene when everyone discovers how close they actually came to death: the wife pops the hood and discovers that her now-incarcerated husband cut the break lines on her car...or, the church congregation finds a massive unexploded bomb hidden beneath the church organ, and the only reason it had failed to explode is because the alarm clock being used as a timer ran out of battery juice....

          Jaxcullen tells the forum that she just found out that the cable tie-out that she used to keep her dangerous child-hunting fucking abomination of a dog Boulder  contained in the yard was flimsy and Boulder could have snapped it at any time.  Since they dirt-napped their mutant, they used the cable for their other dog (presumably also a mutant) who is considerably smaller and weaker than Boulder was.  This dog snapped the cable.  

           Jaxcullen has an inkling of what this means, and this is the lesson she takes away from it: "We'll never put another bull breed dog on a cable again.  Fortunately, no tragedy occurred, but we were so close....There's a reason responsible owners use chains, and in hindsight, simply 'there by the grace of God go I' that we didn't have a news story on our hands.  The cable was a poor poor choice, and we sit with a solemn understanding of that today." 

            So that's the lesson she derives from all this: the cable was a poor, poor choice.  

            If I was her neighbor and I read this, I think I'd have a heart attack.  

            I wasn't terribly angry at Jaxcullen when I read this thread.  Mostly, I was just shocked at her nuttery and her very strange and bad (to my mind) parenting decisions.  Stunned at how blind her ideology had made her.  But this?  This final entry really pissed me off.  Fuck you, Jaxcullen, for putting your neighbors and other members of your community at risk because of your stupid, selfish decision to have your ugly dangerous dogs.  And you really should get a job in PR if you're not in the industry now--look at how well you evade dealing directly with the PROBLEM here, the ugly, awful truth: "Fortunately, no tragedy occurred" instead of "Fortunately, my dangerous-as-hell violent homicidal dog, which I selfishly decided to own, did not break from his containment, which I stupidly and incompetently chose for him, and go on to slaughter, in painful and nightmarish fashion, one of my blameless neighbors."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE THREAD IN ITS ENTIREITY AT PITBULL-CHAT (at least until it's pulled and sent down the memory-hole)