On October 24th it will be National Pit Bull Awareness Day for dog lovers across the country. True to trollish form, a co-opting of the day from the anti-dog internet hate group is in order. Their energy, while everyone else will be celebrating the amazingness of dogs or just going about their usual business, will be on pushing fear and horrific imagery to conjure up negative and irrational emotion. That irrational emotion will then be used to promote intrusion, promote prejudice, promote bans, promote death; and only on platforms where the promoter cannot be intellectually challenged by people that disagree with them.

Surprisingly (or not), PETA has officially aligned themselves to the effort stunt. Imagine that, the “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” being completely unethical.

^What the commenting Brian Christ fails to realize is that PETA also seeks the destruction of Pit Bulls. And look at the response by PETA!! Actually claiming that this “advocacy coalition” wants to “help, not hurt, Pit Bulls.” Um, wow. Yeah, either they have literally no idea in the world who they just aligned themselves with or they are simply lying. I’ll go with lying.

So who are these groups and what is their deal?

Well first, we have the unabashed crowd of anti-Pit Bull deceptive internet aliases, known to follow and parrot the Mount Rushmore of dog hate (Colleen Lynn, Merritt Clifton, “Craven Desires,” Jeff Borchardt). The poisonous ideology they push is dedicated to violence against dogs, really by any means but mainly through collective blame and calling for legislation that mandates multifaceted violence from the state. Many of these folks will go so far as to justify initiated violence against any animal looking (to the perpetrator) like a “Pit Bull.” To these individuals it does not matter what the dog has or has not done. It does not matter that 99.9% of all dogs, no matter the grouping, will forever be innocent of any and all charges made against them. Abhorrent to the extreme but their hate is obvious, which is why they have no support among the general public.

With PETA, their dog ideology centers on sanctioned violence against Pit Bulls (ending their life) in order to save Pit Bulls from potential future violence. They are far more sophisticated about their messaging and will literally lie to your face about their objectives. They’re also helped by their wide-ranging positive work in other animal-related realms, which produces useful idiots that will blindly defend them against their own quotes and commentary on this specific issue.

Now with PETA’s brass in tow, the hate group has come together and created a website for their hijack. And there’s some interesting and telling tactics on full display within the website…

On the page titled “partners and friends” you will see a perfect representation of how repetitive visuals and links aim to give the illusion of unanimous agreement and wide-ranging support for the idea that Pit Bulls are evil and the nation’s bogeyman that should be banned. In reality, these are a handful of blogs and Facebook pages run by the same 10-15 people.

Among these “partners and friends” are 33 Facebook pages, Merritt Clifton’s website, Colleen Lynn’s DogsBite.org and her 3 spinoff websites, Craven Desires’ Blogger page and then 11 more Blogger pages run by the same 3 people, Tony Solesky’s e-book website, Jeff Borchardt’s Daxton’s Friends website, Daxton’s Friends Facebook page, Jeff Borchardt’s WordPress page, Jeff Borchardt’s personal Facebook page, and rounding everything out is PETA. For those counting at home, that’s 5 or 6 separate websites, PETA, and then 50 or so shadow pages.

This is the manifestation of a virtual echo chamber.

In reality, damn near every actual dog and human safety expert organization as well as nearly all mainstream animal welfare groups (except PETA) have publicly stated that breed-specific legislation is both ineffective and wrong.

Regarding the victims of individual dog attacks, it’s always a tragedy when someone truly gets hurt. No one wants other people to get hurt, let alone killed. But with that, every unfortunate scenario is its own happening and comes with its own set of circumstances, and the narrative of the one size fits all response is emptier than uninformed empty. Continuing to scapegoat groups that equate to millions upon millions of dogs does nothing for public safety. It does nothing for getting to the root of a problem. It does nothing for making this world a better place. It does nothing for actual justice.