Fixpert

First, a Portrait of Stribling Avenue

I live on a weird street — Stribling Ave in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s in a nice area, in close proximity to the University of Virginia. Frankly, there are no bad areas of Charlottesville, but somehow this particular street doesn’t have that squeaky clean, pink popped-collar polo bleached teeth college town vibe that the rest of the campus has. For those that are familiar with C’ville, the landmark I use to help locate Stribling is a bar called “Durty Nelly’s”. I’m almost positive they spelled “dirty” that way on purpose.

Anyway, my street has houses that sell for $230k (which, sadly, translates to “really really crappy” in Charlottesville) all the way up to maybe half a million dollars. It’s a mix of renters and homeowners, I’m guessing more renters though. All economic levels are represented on this street, which is something I have never experienced before — usually a street is ghetto or nice, not a mix. There are some grad students, families, older single people, a little bit of everything really. Train tracks run through the backyards of all the houses on the west side of the street, and for some reason this is a prime spot for hobos to jump off the train. I’ve been stopped by a train hopper and asked “which way is Charlottesville?” It was difficult to answer, since technically we were standing in Charlottesville, but I felt compelled to “be cool” and not give any indication that I knew he had just hopped off a frieght train. “Uhh…it’s that way.”

Carl

One of my neighbors — I’ll call him Carl since I have no idea what his name is — has a female pit bull. She doesn’t seem particularly friendly, and in fact does not appear to be a pet as much as a guard dog. She is permanently chained outside his house. She has a small dog house with a sloppy pile of cinder blocks almost entirely covering the doorway. I’ve never seen her being walked, pet, or having any contact with humans. It seems cruel to me, pit bulls have pretty short fur and usually very low body fat and Virginia can get down into the teens and 20’s in the Winter. Pit bulls are not really built for the cold in my opinion.

(These aren’t the pups in question, but aren’t they cute?!)

Well anyway, for whatever reason, Carl was in jail for a couple months this winter. I was glad because he likes to pretend that Stribling is a drag strip and drives his car at 45mph through the sharp, blind turns, even when there are 6 yr olds learning to ride their bikes on this small residential street. While Carl was in jail, his pit bull had puppies. If you’ve never seen a pit bull puppy, they’re actually the cutest possible puppies on the planet. Every day, I would walk my dog down the street and sneak a peek at Carl’s yard to see the cute little puppies chillin’ with their mom. The mom would bark, the puppies would come running to her, and I would pray that the chain was solid because she looked like she wanted to kill me and play with my carcass. I’d continue walking, mom would finally settle down and everything was good.

Then the puppies kept growing. They got big fast. When they were tiny, they tended to cling to their mom and it wasn’t an issue that they didn’t have a fence, a chain, or collars. But then they got bigger and bolder. I started seeing them outside of their yard, roaming around the nieghborhood looking for little morsels of food. By the way, did I mention that people litter all up and down our street? It’s really frustrating because this would be a nice looking street if people didn’t litter. Plus, apparently, litter attracts feral pit bulls puppies. Yes yes, there are wild pit bull puppies roaming free in my neighboorhood now. Hey Carl, thanks a lot. They are completely unsocialized. I’ve tried to lure them with treats, but they run scared from humans, which isn’t a good sign.

Get Up…Get Down…Animal Control is a Joke in Your Town

The animal control dude rolls through our street once a day now to check on the pups. I chatted with him a while back, and he said that he can’t do anything about the dogs unless he happens to drive by when they’re out of the yard. He’s not allowed to go into the yard and take the puppies. I wouldn’t get near them with mom-dog around. So, it’s a weird situation. The dogs are only going to get bigger. Without them being socialized, at a certain point they will become dangerous and probably aggresive. I like pit bulls, I have a pit mix myself — his name is Pizza. When raised properly and trained properly, pits can be really good pets. But, let’s be honest, when they are unsocialized and untrained, they are basically killing machines: something like 1500 pounds per square inch of jaw pressure, with locking jaws to boot. We’re basically talking about land sharks. Friggin’ Carl!