“Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon” by Bronwen Dicket (Knopf, 3552 pages, $26.95)

Several years ago, Durham, North Carolina, author Bronwen Dickey was driving around Atlanta and talking with a friend about the book she was working on. Her friend admitted that the topic — American pit bull terriers — frightened him.

“I’m just afraid of those dogs,” he said. “They’re owned by those big, muscly, macho guys and the dogs always have those spiked collars on. The whole image of that is completely terrifying to me.”

They were stopped at a red light in a nice neighborhood and, almost on cue, a preppy looking guy walked by with his pit. “How about that dog?” Dickey asked. “Are you afraid of that dog?”

“That’s a pit bull?” her friend responded, incredulous.

To Dickey’s friend, pit bulls were inseparable from their hard knocks image — studded collars, tough owners and the ever-present specter of dogfighting — yet almost became different dogs when walked by a clean-cut suburbanite in a polo shirt.

In her new book, “Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon,” Dickey, who owns a pit bull, explores how the breed came to be so vilified and feared. Through seven years of exhaustive research, the author sought the history, the science and the social context of this controversial dog.

“I don’t expect to take everyone’s fear away from them, but I hope the people who are open to learning more would be willing to look at dogs as individuals in every case, no matter what they look like,” Dickey says. She knows fear isn’t rational — she flies all over the world as a journalist, for instance, and she’s still afraid of airplanes.

“I wanted to dig into the truth of this story, regardless of what I found,” says Dickey, who felt there was enough cheerleading already. “It really may be that my dog and these other nice dogs I’ve met are outliers and if they are, that’s still interesting, so let’s explore that and let’s explore how we got to where we are.”

Because of her background in journalism, she knew it was important to check her own assumptions and to seek people with markedly different views or experiences than her own. She reached out to people who wanted pit bulls banned — or exterminated — and she met with parents whose children had been attacked by pits or alleged pit mixes. She also consulted geneticists, pit bull trainers and a slew of scientists and experts. She attended a “Bully Barbecue,” where the studded collars were pure pageantry and the big-headed dogs were beloved couch potatoes. She put on a bite sleeve and let a trained pit bull attack it so she would experience at least the force of a dog attack. That evening, she says the same pit put his paws on her lap and leaned against her, as if to say, “We’re cool, right?”

Are pit bulls over-identified?

Dickey discovered that statistics on pit bull attacks, bite strength and ability (some reports claim a pit bull can simultaneously clamp its front teeth and grind its rear teeth — a physical impossibility, Dickey points out) and even overall pit bull population are often misleading, if not grossly inaccurate. Further complicating these figures, many dogs identified as pits or pit mixes in news coverage or bite reports may have no pit bull in them whatsoever.

“The term ‘pit mix,’ at this point, is almost ‘dog, not otherwise specified.’ If you have no idea what it is, just say it’s a pit mix,” Dickey says. “We know from multiple studies that have been done since at least 2009 that visual identification of mixed breed dogs is highly inaccurate — over 87 percent of the time it’s inaccurate.”

In the book, she presents an experiment in which a purebred basenji and a cocker spaniel — two dogs whose distinctive attributes have little overlap — were mated. By the second generation, as the photos show, the puppies looked very little like either original breed.

Vilifying dog breeds

If the statistical proof of pit bulls being inherently dangerous is problematic, the social history of vilifying specific dog breeds is more so: in the 1870s, Spitzes were viewed as a rabies-ridden, sub-canine nuisance and were clubbed or drowned in significant numbers. This wasn’t because of anything scientific or rational, but because of their association with German immigrants. Rottweilers, dachshunds, Doberman pinschers and German shepherds have all spent time under this unfortunate limelight. Often, as with the Spitz, the public outcry against a dog mirrors prejudice against a minority associated with it.

“When there are tensions between social groups, often the dogs of groups that we may find threatening or that our group might be in conflict with often become proxies for their people,” Dickey says. “That kind of undercurrent of really ugly, violent racism that was simmering under American dog culture was really sad.”

She cites both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s decrees to have their slaves’ dogs killed, and notes that Jews’ dogs were seized and killed in Nazi Germany. In modern American cities where there are pit bull bans, she writes, these can be used as excuses to over-police African American neighborhoods under the pretense of enforcing breed bans. Much of the language used in decrying pit bulls and the people who own them, she says, is often racially charged — words like “thug” or “dealer.”

It’s easy to make judgments from a distance, Dickey says. To really understand a person — or their dog — you have to meet them and get to know them, no matter what background they’re from.