Too Many.

The American Pit Bull Terrier is ONE BREED, the problem is there are many different BLOODLINES. That is why the AKC won't register them... No one knows what exactly is the true APBT. The reason is that instead of one person creating the breed like Poodles, a lot of different people were interested in creating an APBT and so the breed was never really able to become very specific so we have a lot of variation through the breed, which if you ask me is very fitting of the name after all they are "American" so the diversity works, or atleast to me it does. As a breeder you just have to learn a lot about the breed and watch different bloodlines, certain bloodlines tend to have temperment problems mostly because they are the lines that are used and bred for fighting and have been for YEARS. The same kind of thing happened with the American Bulldog, there were 2 people who started that breed and as the years went on the 2 separated and bred for different things, the result was the standard (athletic) Type American Bulldog and the Johnson (Bully) Type American Bulldog, of course since then there are more breeders who have bred athletics with bullys and now there is the "hybrid" American bulldogs... they too have a large range of appearances and are sometimes mistaken for pitbulls and thus bred with pitbulls and that is where you have to be smart as a breeder and try to understand what you are looking at, I have seen UKC reg. APBTs that look like Bully ABs, its sad but it happens. The UKC does have a pretty good Conformation Standard written up but there are a lot of breeders who breed grossly out of conformation, the question I ask is at what point does the UKC come in and tell those breeders they have bred too far from conformation and so their dogs will no longer be able to be registered, can they do this? After all the dogs can be proven to have been produced by APBTs. But I do think that someone is going to have to take charge if they want the APBT to have an "official" look, if there was an "official" APBT it would deffinately be easier to prove that Pit Bulls are not bad dogs, just the poorly bred sad excuses for dogs that people label as "pit bulls" are the ones that are usually bad. The other thing that we have to be able to do is get people to understand that if it is not registered it can not and should not be called a Pit Bull, it can be called a bully or a pit mix, but calling it a Pit Bull just gives the registered dogs a bad name that they don't deserve. Question for thought: When was the last time a reporter asked if the dog was REGISTERED before they labeled it as a "Pit Bull"?