A shy and lovable pit bull?

Martha, aka The Divine Miss M, using chocolate lab Aquinnah as a pillow

Pity the "ferocious" pit bull terrier. Just as humans vary in temperament and upbringing, the same is true of our dogs, including the much-maligned pit. Yet people unfamiliar with the breed often fail to draw such distinctions when it comes to these supposed bad boys of the canine realm.

Martha, our pit bull/lab mix (trust me - lots of terrier, not much lab) will be two years old in two months. When we adopted her from the shelter back in January of last year, she was a tiny bundle of fuzzy, wide-eyed goofiness, a helpless creature that immediately bonded with Aquinnah, our full-grown chocolate lab.

Some things have changed. Martha is still wide-eyed, goofy and devoted to Aquinnah, but she weighs in at about 37 pounds now. That’s still on the small side for a pit. She's so slim that even if I take both of her front paws in the palm of my hand, there’s room to spare. Which probably explains why Martha intimidates no one on our walks. That, and the fact that she wants to jump on everyone she meets to lick the skin off their faces, once she overcomes her initial shyness.

Martha is about as fearsome as Snooki is elegant.

When I took her for a walk around the block last Thursday, which is trash day in our neighborhood, the city had yet to make its curbside pickups, so there were several large, flattened cardboard boxes piled up on the sidewalk in front of one house. Martha, ever fearful of anything new, categorically refused to walk by the boxes. She simply plopped herself on the sidewalk and stared at them with a terrified look in her eye until I picked her up and literally carried her to “safety.”

A day or two later, when my wife Liz met a group of friendly teenagers while she was out walking Martha, Liz had to hold Martha in her arms so the boys could pet her, because she was too frightened to let the kids approach her while she stood on the sidewalk.

Yup, she's a menace, all right.

Responsible pit-bull owners are well aware that our beloved pups have an image problem. But behind every “vicious” or “dangerous” pit stands an irresponsible owner who is too ignorant, indifferent or sociopathic to properly train, socialize and restrain his dog.

The blame of, course, is shouldered by the four-legged victim, not the two-legged culprit.