Making your dog fight is cruel. Letting your dog attack an animal or dog that doesn't want to fight is cruel and pointless. Letting your dog or encouraging your dog to fight an equally interested opponent in order to establish his or her worth is a complicated scenario. I have never considered a match to be completely fair to dogs nor the best way to gametest, especially when sums of money are involved. In a match people are almost always partial, as you would soon discover if you spoke to both parties independently afterwards. I've often heard conflicting recollections of the same event. Winning and creating a champion is "numero uno" on the agenda. Enhancing a dogs performance with drugs is also far to common as the main interest lies with winning and not in objectively analysing your prodigys talents naturally and fairly. Dogs respond individually to drugs, what supercharges one dog, sends another into a haze or perhaps induces a migrain thus providing a misleading result. In a match money and personal prestige often causes the owner/handler to take things beyond justifiable limits as a truly game dog doesn't himself understand "quit". A match is also a 50/50 tossupp between the handler/trainers knowledge and the dog's actual genes. A lesser dog in the hands of an expert can win against a better dog in the hands of an amateur. Everyone wants to breed to a champion. But a champion is only better than the competition and conditions presented to him on that day. This applies to both pit dogs and in the creation of the beauty queens of the show rings. A roll on the other hand is a test of gameness and ability and can be paused or stopped whenever deemed necessary. Dogs can even be exhausted prior to going in to limit time and damage. If a roll is done beetwen friends or people genuinely interested in finding out a dog's capabilities it is superior to a match in determining breeding value. This is as I hope everyone realises completely illegal and in today's world I strongly advise that you stick to Iron Dog activities. Not just one but of them but all of them if you want the best allround dog possible. I like a dog that not only performs but also functions in other aspects of daily life as a house dog. A mature dog that quits after being taught the moves is either ill or lacks what it takes and would probably quit in other situations too. Obviously many champions are real aces that would do well no matter what, but not all of them. I have personally seen winners and even champs lose unofficial rolls to unmerited dogs. But if you own a "firecracker" and that same dog does well in Iron Dog activities and loves your kids, congratulations, you've got the foundation for starting your own strain for your grandkids to inherit. 
The following is from The history of the Gestapo by Jacques Delarue: The crimes of Nazism are not the crimes of one nation. Cruelty, a taste for violence, the religion of force, ferocious racialism, are not the prerogative of a period or of a people. They are of all ages and of all countries. They have biological and psychological bases which it is by no means certain that we shall escape again. The human being is a dangerous wild animal. In normal periods his evil instincts remain in the background, held in check by the conventions, habits, laws and criteria of civilization, but let a regime come which not only liberates these terrible impulses but makes a virtue out of them, then from the depths of time the snout of the beast reappears, tears aside the slender disguise imposed by civilization and howls the death-cries of forgotten ages. Please choose your surroundings and influences with care and try to remain righteous in life and in dealing with dogs. |