Jeff Jenkins and the Pit Bull Training Team

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER Last March, photographer Saverio Truglia and End Dogfighting’s Jeff Jenkins decided to make a trade. Truglia needed someone who could suspend models from the ceiling of his studio so he could shoot them hanging like acrobats in midair for a soda ad (a job that Jenkins, as cofounder of the Midnight Circus, was well qualified to do). In return, Jenkins asked Truglia to take photos of his Pit Bull Training Team. “Jeff said, ‘I’m having trouble showing people what this campaign is about: really interesting guys and really beautiful animals. One thing that’s missing is great images,’” Truglia recalls. The shoots weren’t easy. “These dogs are like loose cannons,” Truglia says. “They have so much energy and they’re really all over the place, especially when there are other dogs around.” Despite the challenge the pit bulls presented, he says, “It was really powerful to see these tough-looking men and boys necessarily show their softer side to these animals. To see them have to shower love on these animals to get them to respond in the appropriate way, it’s surely cathartic for them and it was amazing for me.” Truglia shares his thoughts on his subjects throughout this story.

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On a Saturday in mid-February, Jeff Jenkins finds himself, as he does every Saturday afternoon, at the Carroll Care Center on the city’s rough-and-tumble West Side, taunting a roomful of pit bulls. A “temperament test,” he calls it. Marching in circles around the animals resting comfortably beside their owners, he tilts his head toward the ceiling and yells gibberish into the narrow end of a blaze-orange construction cone. Eliciting little reaction from the docile beasts, he tries banging on a metal garbage-can lid, like a Michigan Avenue bucket boy. Still nothing. His final enticement: rolling a desk chair occupied by an 11-year-old boy, whose untied shoelaces slide across the cement floor, mere inches from each dog’s snout.

As lead trainer of End Dogfighting, a campaign sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) that specializes in turning dogfighters into dog lovers, Jenkins, 41, knows that a few months ago some of these pit bulls would’ve made quick lunch of his leg. “When these dogs first came through the door,” he says, “they were all extremely aggressive. And if you get two dogs going at each other, all hell can break loose. All the dogs will revert immediately back to their old behavior. That’s part of the challenge.” But on this day, they don’t budge, don’t bark, don’t so much as snarl. They remain in the “down-stay” position commanded by their owners, who beam like proud parents. When the dogs are calm and their owners are smiling, that’s when Jenkins knows he’s doing his job.

On Saturdays in Austin on the West Side and Wednesdays in Englewood on the South Side—neighborhoods where street-level dogfighting is rampant—Jenkins and his Pit Bull Training Team (PBTT) offer free obedience classes to pit-bull owners, mostly young black men and boys. Some used to fight their dogs in basement and backyard rings. Others are at risk of becoming engaged in the underground blood sport. Several PBTT members also serve as Anti-Dogfighting Advocates (ADAs), whose job it is to recruit new students, break up dog fights in their communities and visit area elementary schools to educate about animal cruelty. In three years, more than 100 Chicagoans and their dogs have completed Jenkins’s ten-week obedience class.

Essentially, Jenkins has incubated a new approach to combating dogfighting that involves reaching out to afflicted communities and showing them the joys of responsible pet ownership. He has spread the End Dogfighting program to Atlanta and Milwaukee, and is planning expansion to Philadelphia and Los Angeles, as well as Chicago’s Humboldt Park and Little Village neighborhoods.

The program was launched in 2006, when Tio Hardiman was doing consulting with HSUS to devise a way to curb dogfighting, which he saw plaguing minority communities. To put things in perspective, there are 40,000 dogfighters in the U.S., according to an HSUS estimate, that claim the lives of 250,000 dogs each year. Last year alone, the Cook County Sheriff’s Department rescued 241 dogs from dogfighting operations and made 26 felony arrests. But the blood-splattered rings are also a petri dish of other crime. “Where there is dogfighting, we’ve found there is definitely other criminal activity,” says Sheriff’s Department spokesman Steve Patterson. “Gangs are finding dogfighting is a lucrative enterprise to fund their other operations. We’re talking about hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in cash being traded. Gunrunning, drug dealing and other illicit activities go hand-in-hand with dogfighting.” (Hardiman says Anti-Dogfighting Advocates have a good but decidedly distant relationship with the Sheriff’s Department to ensure dogfighters don’t associate Jenkins and company with law enforcement.)

Hardiman, a former longtime gangbanger, was confident he could round up a group of guys from the West Side to participate in a grassroots plan to eradicate dogfighting. But he needed someone to handle the pit bulls, the most common breed used to fight. A representative at the Anti-Cruelty Society pointed Hardiman to Jenkins, who had a reputation in the local animal-training community when it came to pit bulls. For years, Jenkins has performed with his pit bull, Lola, in the Midnight Circus company that he and his wife, Julie Greenberg, founded. He and Lola also occasionally perform during halftimes and time-outs at Bulls games.

“Tio asked me,” Jenkins says, “‘Is it possible? If I get you eight guys and eight pit bulls, can you get them in a room together and not have a bloodbath?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, if we got the right leashes.’ And that’s the first thing we went out and did.”