The story of Ira Glass' dog, Piney

A story about a pit bull with a broader lesson

A friend pointed me to a story of when The host of This American Life once tried to raise a pit bull with his now ex-wife that I think is worth sharing, as there’s some important broader lessons for our society.

This isn’t a made up tale or internet rumor. Ira Glass has talked about it himself repeatedly in interviews that are painful to read in retrospect. Painful because it’s so obvious what’s happening, and was also all so avoidable.

Ira’s wife, Anaheed, had owned a pit bull before they were married. Sadly, that dog died shortly before the wedding. It had been a rescue, so they decided to rescue another. The main motivation here was about doing what they felt was the right thing.

The new dog came with the name Marley, what Ira later called its “slave name” and they renamed him Piney. Almost immediately, Piney began exhibiting “allergies” to his food. To find a solution, one vet became two. Two became four. Soon, Ira and his wife were spending more time cooking for the dog than for themselves.

And here’s where the pattern becomes impossible to ignore: Piney appeared to develop allergies to every new meat he was given. Chicken, beef, lamb, no good. Piney cycled through a series of exotic single‑protein diets, including things like ostrich and bison. Ira had to take regular hour-plus trips just to source fresh, exotic meat for the dog.

At some point Ira admits he started fantasizing about what life might be like if he didn’t have Piney. He talks about the dog not as a pet, or even a responsibility, but as something helpless, dependent, precious. Something that required constant self-sacrifice.

But Piney wasn’t simply “high-needs.” Piney was violent.

He attacked people arbitrarily. He broke skin. He went in for serious bites. Ira knew this, and still referred to them as “nips.” Trainers were hired. Medications were prescribed. Piney ended up on anti‑anxiety and psychiatric pharmaceuticals while excuses multiplied and their justifications calcified.

Listening to Ira describe it, he sounds like an abused partner. The dog controlled his life. He couldn’t leave for long. People couldn’t come over, his social life collapsed, his home became a hazard. And yet, he kept explaining it away.

What’s especially striking is that this dog did not even appear to love Ira. It may have bonded with Anaheed, but it saw Ira as a threat, an aggressive male who shouldn’t be near his own wife. The dog was not misunderstood, it was not misjudged, it was doing exactly what it was wired to do. Biology and genetics are real things, combined with how the previous owners had treated it.

Eventually, Ira and Anaheed divorced. In a later interview, he confirmed what’s obvious to any outside observer: Piney contributed to the marriage failing.

From the outset, the entire project was delusional. Ira and his wife didn’t actually adopt a dog, they adopted a cause. They wanted to prove that pit bulls were unfairly maligned. That with enough love, enough care, enough sacrifice, you could redeem a creature the world had decided was bad.

Why they believed this is easy to guess. They were addicted to the feel-good narrative. The story where they were the good people, protecting an innocent underdog, rescuing a sweet, misunderstood animal from a cruel world that hated it for no reason.

But that story wasn’t true. They weren’t saving Piney. Piney was destroying them.

As others have noted about this story, it is incredible to watch a man who is so perceptive about culture, media, and human behavior become completely blind in the face of his own moral vanity. Any rational person should have put the dog down or found an aggression-experienced animal rescue. Instead, Ira and Anaheed sacrificed their time, their relationships, their peace, and ultimately their marriage.

And they’re not unique. Many people whose kids get mauled, whose neighbors get attacked, whose lives are permanently altered are in this same situation. They have misplaced compassion for something that cannot be rehabilitated. They refuse to accept that some animals have earned their reputations and are simply not good pets.

The lesson is this: Ira and Anaheed were addicted to the feel-good notion that they were protecting an innocent animal, saving its life from a world that hated it. But really, it was simply ruining their life. They let their empathy be exploited. You have to understand, some things are just not compatible with civilized life. And without the strength to know this in earnest, and take appropriate action (or hopefully make the right decision before action is needed) you are not a fully mature adult.

There’s some broader lessons from this story at the civilizational level, by the way. A major one is it’s clear some people have no limiting principle in terms of tolerating crime or bad behavior, because they think they are morally required to live like that. This even extends to judges who release violent, repeat offender criminals who then go out and kill someone which is a recurring pattern in America. "Three strikes and you're out" laws get a lot of pushback, but the approach is essentially correct. The goal should be to remove super-predators from society forever, but to give one-time criminals a stern and decisive warning. There’s more. I’m sure you can think of them.