In 2013, my wife and I adopted a puppy. At the shelter, her breed was listed as "pit bull terrier". We named her Artemis.
Around the same time, we started looking into adopting a child. We checked out various adoption agencies, listened to their spiel. You can probably picture about how it looked; group of 20 or 30 prospective parents sitting in a room while an agency rep gets up at the front and gives a presentation explaining who they are and how the process works.
At one of them, maybe the first one we went to, the lady giving the presentation got to the part about pets and said dog breeds didn't matter except for two: they wouldn't allow adoption by families with pit bulls or Rottweilers. She said something ignorant like "Those breeds aren't safe; we've tried before and no matter how they're raised and no matter how well-trained they are, they could lash out and attack without warning at any time."
My wife and I were stunned. We were still new to this; we didn't know whether we'd just given up our chances at adoption by choosing the wrong breed of puppy.
And for my part, I couldn't help noticing the irony of an adoption agency judging an adopted member of our family as unsafe based entirely on who her biological parents were.
(Incidentally, maybe a week after this, my nephew — two years old at the time — poked Artie right in the eye and she just let him do it and didn't react. Some vicious beast.)
My first reaction to the adoption agency judging my puppy was the same as my first reaction to a lot of things in life: "They can go fuck themselves." My wife, more diplomatic than I am, asked the lady after the presentation if there was anything we could do to change their mind. The lady said we could get a DNA test and if the dog was less than 50% pit bull that would be okay.
We also talked to the trainer we'd been seeing at the shelter and asked him if he had any suggestions for proving our dog was safe. He suggested getting her certified as a Canine Good Citizen.
We got the DNA test; it said she was 1/4 bull terrier, 1/4 cairn terrier, 1/8 boxer, the rest indeterminate. And we got the Good Citizen certificate. But in the end, we chose not to go with that agency anyway, or any agency; we opted for private adoption instead.
And when the social worker came to our house to evaluate us, we told her about the challenges we'd faced, including the adoption agency that didn't want to work with us because our dog was too dangerous.
The social worker looked down at her feet, where Artie had curled up and fallen asleep, and said "This dog?" and laughed. We passed the evaluation.
Close to a decade after we got Artie, we were finally able to adopt a baby. And when the baby became a toddler and pulled her tail and poked her eyes, she took it with quiet dignity.
Artie passed away last month, at the ripe old age of 11. I've given away most of her things but there's still a tote in the garage I need to go through. Most of her paperwork is going in the recycle bin. But I'm going to hang onto her DNA results and her Good Citizen certificate.
The shelter doesn't use the "pit bull terrier" designation anymore. They just say "terrier mix" now.