Pit Bulls in the News: McDonald's and TV News Anchor

By Cesar Millan
Pit bulls were in the news again this week, and as usual, not for the best reasons. A lot of the people who visit CesarsWay.com began tweeting us Friday morning about a McDonald’s ad they had heard on the radio. The ad said that trying a new menu item was less risky than other activities—like petting a stray pit bull. Pit bull lovers were understandably angry with McDonald’s and within hours a Facebook protest had gone up and people began calling the McDonald’s corporate headquarters to complain. That same afternoon, McDonald’s pulled the ad and publicly apologized. It was wonderful to see what people can accomplish when they put their minds to it and raise their voices.
The next big pit bull story of the week did not have a happy ending. It came from Denver when television anchor Kyle Dyer was reporting on a story about an Argentine Mastiff named Max who had been rescued from an icy lake by a firefighter. She was reuniting the dog, his owner, and the firefighter in the studio, but things went bad when she tried to kiss Max at the end of the interview and he bit her, sending her to the hospital.

It became a big story on many news programs, including The Insider, which contacted me to appear as an expert on dog behavior. I was very honored to be asked, but was a little disappointed when I saw that before I spoke, they showed a graphic that said “Who’s to blame?” When they interviewed me, I tried to choose my words very carefully, because to me an incident like this isn’t about blame, but how to learn a lesson from what happened.
They did show two of the most important things I said about why this may have happened. First of all, if you have never been in a studio during taping, it’s a crazy energy. There are people running around, strange noises, bright lights, and lots of shouting. Even for humans, it can freak you out, so you can imagine what it’s like for a dog to be in that environment.
The other thing to always remember when meeting ANY dog is the rule, “no touch, no talk, no eye contact”. You have to let the dog approach you and show him that you aren’t a threat. With Max, you could tell before the bite there was going to be trouble, because, she was holding his face with both hands and he was getting more and more uncomfortable, and when she leaned in to kiss him a the end, he thought it was an aggressive act and bit her.
We have to remember it’s a dog, and they don’t understand it’s a sweet Valentine’s Day kiss. They just know they’re in a crazy place and someone is holding their collar and their face and not letting them get used to their surroundings. Finally, a human is invading their space with their hands and mouth. Max was clearly stressed out, and he got to a breaking point. Kyle Dyer clearly didn’t think she was upsetting the dog, and clearly meant well, but when you look at the situation from Max’s point of view, you can see how things went wrong.

What really disappointed me about The Insider story was the commentary by anchor Kevin Frazier at the end of the piece. He said the lesson to be learned was that people needed to control their big dogs. He said in his neighborhood there were “people not taking care of their bigger, dangerous dogs and letting them run wild.” This was absolutely NOT the lesson to take from this story. What happened had nothing to do with the size of the dog or the breed of the dog. This could have happened with any breed or any size of dog who was put in the same situation as Max. Just like in the McDonald’s commercial, the problem wasn’t that it isn’t risky to pet stray dogs, it’s that pit bulls aren’t any more risky than any other breed.
I hope when stories like these happen again, we don’t use them to reinforce prejudices about breeds. The lesson in these stories isn’t to be afraid of one type of dog or another, but to learn how to approach a dog, whether it’s a stray or just a dog you haven’t met before. By learning that, we learn how not to hurt the dog or ourselves. Prejudice just hurts everyone.