by Carlina

Created on: January 21, 2007   Last Updated: April 30, 2007

A lover or a fighter? Probably no dog is more misunderstood than the pit bull, and no one understands that more than the many pet rescuers and animal rights' activists who attempt to defend the breed.

Dog trainer and rescuer Diana Ross, who owns D&D Concepts, said bully breeds which include a variety of bulldogs and pit bull types don't deserve their reputation. Bad owners not bad dogs are to blame for the bad rap, she said.

"Pit bulls are just dogs. They're powerful, strong-willed dogs, but they're good-natured and easy to train," Ross said. "It's the people who take them and train them to be mean that are to blame."

It's no wonder the breed is so maligned. Pit bull Web sites are all over the Internet, and many of them feature irresponsible breeders bragging about how large and aggressive their dogs are. Many of them, Ross said, fight their bulls for sport.

"The people that fight pit bulls would (fight) other breeds," Ross said.

Nancy Parker-Simmons, executive director of Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch in Medina, concurred.

"No dog is naturally mean. People make dogs mean," Simmons said. "Any dog can hurt someone or bite someone. It depends on what their owners train them to do. If they're trained to kill or be killed, what else can they do?"

To add to the problem, Ross said many bull-type dogs are abandoned because their owners are not fully prepared for the responsibility of owning a dog. Instead of taking the time to handle and train the dog, she said, they give up and either let the dog go undisciplined or abandon it.

Both Ross and Simmons have rescued all types of breeds from all sorts of unthinkable circumstances. They take dogs that many would call "viscous," and transform them into obedient, lovable creatures.

One of their most recent successes is Mama, a three-legged pit bull, who was found more than a year ago in downtown Austin, were she lay beaten-up and dying. They suspect Mama was a victim of pit fighting.

"The dog was completely torn up. Her back leg was dangling," Simmons remembered. "No one knows for sure, but we thought maybe she had been trained to fight or that she could have been used as a bait-dog."

"Her leg was shattered and full of bite-holes," Ross added.

Nursing those wounds was the easy part. The real healing to recondition her away from fighting started only weeks ago, when Ross temporarily took in Mama to give her one-on-one attention. The process, Ross said, involved common sense and a balance of love and discipline.

When Mama came to Ross, she

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