During a conversation on The Howard Stern Show, actor Jon Bernthal made a defense of pitbulls after Stern asked what the dogs were doing during a street confrontation Bernthal described from July 2009.
Bernthal had been walking through his Venice, California neighborhood on the night in question with his two pitbulls when he got into a confrontation after a man from a nearby party grabbed one of his dogs and refused to let go.
“The myth of the pitbull is a lot of bulls**t,” Stern asked.
Bernthal agreed, saying, “People got to stop that s**t.”
Stern then said, “Pitbulls don’t attack.”
Bernthal compared fear of the breed to prejudice. “It’s just racism. It’s just dog racism,” he said. “To be afraid of a breed of dog is completely ridiculous. It’s like being afraid of somebody for their race or their sexual orientation. It’s completely ridiculous.”
Bernthal did not claim that a pitbull bite is harmless. “If a pitbull bites you, it’s going to suck,” he said, “but they’re no more likely to bite you than a Chihuahua or any other breed of dog.”
A host then suggested the problem probably has more to do with who owns the dogs and how they were trained. Bernthal agreed and placed the blame squarely on irresponsible owners.
“I think that a lot of knuckleheads, unfortunately, are attracted to that breed of dog,” he said. “To me, that’s not manly or strong at all. You got to train your dogs.”
When Stern circled back to ask what the dogs were doing during the incident, Bernthal said they were fine, then turned the question into a point about the breed’s reputation.
His view is that pit bulls carry an unfair label because of the people drawn to own them, not because of anything built into the animals themselves. Breed-based fear, in Bernthal’s telling, is just another form of judging something, or someone, before you know them.
