Ask ten people to define “pit bull” and you’ll get ten answers. Ask ten shelter workers to look at the same dog and tell you whether it’s a pit bull, and you’ll get something close to a coin flip.
That isn’t an exaggeration. It’s the finding of a study out of the University of Florida’s Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program, published in The Veterinary Journal in 2015. Researchers took 120 dogs across four shelters, asked staff members to visually identify each one, then ran DNA on every dog. The DNA said 21 percent of them had pit bull heritage. Shelter staff had labeled 52 percent as pit bulls.
Put another way: more than half the dogs wearing that label had no genetic claim to it.
The label is doing work the science can’t support
The researchers dug further. Depending on which staff member was judging, dogs that genuinely did have pit bull ancestry were correctly identified somewhere between 33 and 75 percent of the time. Dogs with no relevant DNA at all were labeled pit bull-type as often as 48 percent of the time, depending on the evaluator. These were experienced professionals, including veterinarians, looking at the same dogs on the same day and disagreeing with each other.
A larger 2018 study of 919 shelter dogs found something similar. Staff correctly named a dog’s primary breed roughly 56 percent of the time and got both the primary and secondary breed right in only about 10 percent of cases. Among dogs labeled as pit bull mixes, a third had zero pit bull-type breeds show up in their genetics.
There’s a structural reason for all of this. “Pit bull” is not a breed recognized by any kennel club. It’s an umbrella term that gets stretched over the American Pit Bull Terrier, the American Staffordshire Terrier, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, the American Bully, and any mixed-breed dog whose head happens to be wide and whose coat happens to be short. There is no DNA test for “pit bull,” because there is no such thing to test for.
Why a guess turns into a sentence
None of this would matter much if the label were just paperwork. It isn’t.
The word “pit bull” on a kennel card can determine whether an insurance company writes a homeowners policy. It can decide whether a landlord returns a phone call. In cities with breed-specific ordinances, it can determine where a family is allowed to live. And inside the shelter, it changes how long a dog waits for someone to stop at its kennel.
So the chain looks like this. A staff member takes a quick look at a dog whose history is unknown. They write down a word. That word follows the dog through its file, onto its listing, into the adoption conversation, and sometimes into a decision about whether the dog gets more time.
The dog never changed. The description did.
What to do with this information
The most useful response is not to argue about which dogs “really” are pit bulls. It’s to notice that the question was never answerable in the first place, and to evaluate the dog in front of you instead.
Ask about the individual animal. Is he housetrained? How does he do with other dogs? What does his foster say about the first week? Does he settle at night? Those answers tell you something. A guess about his ancestry does not.
Several shelters have stopped listing breed on kennel cards entirely for exactly this reason. When three New York City-area shelters removed breed labels from adoption cards, median length of stay dropped from just over 30 days to 19, and the return rate held steady at 6 percent. Adopters didn’t make worse decisions without the label. They made faster ones.
Meeting the dog, not the word
This is the whole idea behind how Kennel to Couch works. We focus on one dog at a time, the most at-risk dog in a partner shelter, and we put that individual’s name, face, and personality in front of people. Not a category. Not a breed guess.
October is National Pit Bull Awareness Month. If you want to do one useful thing with it, try this: the next time you see a dog described by breed, ask what the dog is actually like. You’ll usually find that nobody had written that part down.
See the dogs we’re sponsoring right now → kenneltocouch.org/pitbull-adoption
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