You can go right to About Dogs:American Pit Bull Terrier website
by clicking onto any of this text.
In 1898, Chauncy Bennet formed the UKC, a breed registry aimed solely at the registration and acceptance of pitbulls. The AKC had wanted nothing to do with pitbulls, so Bennet sought to create an organization that would represent the breed as performance dogs. Mr. Bennet added American and initially dropped Pit from the APBTs name but public outcry let to Pit being added back to the name thus the American Pit Bull Terrier.
For a pitbull to be accepted into the UKC the dog had to have won three fights a requirement that was later dropped. Another registry that was started solely for APBTs, the American Dog Breeders Association was born in 1909. The ADBA was started by Guy McCord who was a close friend of one of the founding fathers of the modern APBT, John P. Colby. The ADBA was created to test the performance quality of a APBT without actual pit fighting; the ADBAs main focus was on weight pulling competitions with a spattering of conformation shows.
The AKC decided to register Pit Bulls but under a different name the Staffordshire Terrier, which was later changed to the American Staffordshire Terrier in 1972, or AST. Up until 1936, Pit Bulls and ASTs were physically identical. After 1936, ASTs were bred solely for conformation and their breed requirements became much more stringent. | |