TRICKling through the Internet

Quite sometime back, I first heard about Germany banning pit bulls. Someone who had Internet service in her house had read about it on the Internet, but couldn't provide details as all her information was of the "somebody said that somebody said, that someone else told them" sort.

I did NOT have Internet where I lived, and had to go to a public place and use their computers. It was very time consuming and I was extremely inexperienced. But I was very persistent, because I had made this like a test, I would find this in German and I would get a German speaking person to tell me what it said (I did not know of computer translations, if they had them then).

I googled it/yahooed it and got a huge number of hits, but whenever I would click on a hit, it would have absolutely nothing to do with what I was looking for. I kept at it. I just kept slogging through. I would go home and complain about the worthlessness of computers because it was like "Trying to find a needle in a haystack".

I was really discouraged. But I knew the information had to be online somewhere. I didn't want secondhand information, I wanted a link to the actual German Law that I could have translated by someone who I know who speaks German.

I would google it, and get a list of 'hits' supposedly of what I wanted, but when I would click on them, all that would come up would be a photo of a little kid beside a pit bull.

What would you think?

After awhile it dawned on me that these lies probably had one source. That somewhere out there some one or some group was somehow placing this Internet filibuster in my path.

The photos were NOT of the same kid, or the same pit bull. I decided to study the photos for clues.

All the pit bulls looked clean, many of them fresh washed - sign of a breeder - breeders photo fresh washed dogs, regular people photo their dogs when company comes or for some event or on a nice day or when they go somewhere. Not that regular people don't photo their dog right after a bath too - but not like breeders do.

For a breeder, the dog is the focus of the photo, for pet people, the dog is only part of the photo. Often the photos had the dog in the center of the photo, the child would sometimes have an arm or part of the head cropped out of the photo - the pit bull was what the photo was about.

After awhile, I noticed something else, almost all of the kids were preschool aged. And most of them were girls. The girls were dressed in summer clothes, but often the clothes were wrinkled and the girl's hair uncombed. The dogs were clearly (to me then) the focus of the photos.

These were not your usual false hits. The title would read like "Exact words of German Pit Bull Ban Here." but it would just be a photo - the same kind of photo: a preschool age girl and a pit bull.

What would you think? I figured that I was being deliberately misled. Finally, I thought "What would these people call their club?" And I found it. Not under "pitbull" but under one of the gussy upped purebred names of the breed.

There it was, a post by a pit bull club asking its members to each put a kid & dog photo under the title of the German Pitbull Ban so as to swamp google so that Americans would not find it, read it, and try to get a pit bull ban here.

So I knew who was filibustering the Internet, and why, but I still had to find the German law. I kept thinking what would they say, trying to see it as they would, and I found a bunch of posts with the German name of the law on it , all with only a photo of a little girl and a pit bull, but now I knew the German words for it.

Finally, I found where someone (not a pit bull person) had posted it in German, and in translation. It didn't say that much - just that they were banning fighting dog breeds , and a list of the banned breeds, including pit bulls.

It might be unreasonable, feelings usually are, but I just can't ever feel good about anything posted by pit bull people since.