Humans and canines have had a strong relationship for many years. Domesticated dogs or Canis familiaris  "dates back as far as 50,000 years" (McHugh 13).  Over the thousands of years, dog interbred with coyotes, jackals and wolves,  "making these populations too intermixed to support a straightforward, linear story of the descent of dogs from one species" (McHugh 13-14). McHugh doesn't support the idea that you can pin point which breed came from where.

Dogs have performed various different jobs and roles for humans since the relationship began: hunting, protection/guarding, herding, tracking, therapy, warring as soldiers, and companionship. Even though there is a great importance for dogs in this interspecies relationship, "the dangers for contemporary dogs are real: destroyed by the millions every year as unwanted pets, strays and research subjects, domesticated dogs bear the double-bind of sharing many of the maladies as well as the joys of living the so-called good life, and they are also subjected to the mass killings that the world's poorest people and majority of all animal species on an unprecendented scale" (McHugh 9). Because of this interspecies interdependency, "dogs are the only domesticated animals who cannot survive on their own" (Masson 75).  People in contemporary times have taken a once so vital relationship for granted through over population and this era's change in vocations. This ties in with "pitbulls" because they have been taken for granted in the latter half the of the twentieth century with the surge in popularity in dog fighting.

With the jobs that dogs perform, it is also important to humans to define dogs by their behavior when establishing the different breeds. There is a consensus that breed-specific behavior traits are rare. Because of this, it poses a problem in defining dogs because humans tend to catalog based upon visual standards. But "any dog can exhibit any degree of these traits, indicating how widespread they can be" (McHugh 63). Dogs, regardless of established "breed", are capable for taking on the stereotypical traits of other breeds - shepherds could retrieve, Retrievers could hunt, or hounds could herd. This could be said about a breed that was bred for fighting, or bull baiting could be capable of compassion beyond comparison.

This lays the footing for the argument that "pitbulls" have lost their importance to stereotypical fears of aggression and the hysteria over what their "breed" was originally bred to do. Before we discuss those fears, lets explain what a "pit bull" is and their past.