Wow this post got popular. I got called into work and didnt see the replies, sorry ladies and gentlemen! Trying to catch up tonight.
I don’t write off a whole breed, but I will say that my niece got her face seriously ripped up by a pit bull, and I have a friend who raised a pit bull from a puppy, devoted thousands of dollars and professional hours into her training and socialization, and she still bit someone simply for entering her house. I am leery of the breed.
If you will not write off a whole breed of dogs, you have not spent enough time around dogs.
Shepherds do not need to be taught to herd. Retrievers do not need to be taught to retrieve. Pointers do not need to be taught to point. Fighters do not need to be taught to fight.
These are innate behaviors. You can’t stop them.
There’s a reason pit bulls account for such a large fraction a dog related injuries.
And don’t let the pitbull defenders get to you with their “but it’s a mutt” or “they’re such sweet dogs” BS.
Of course they’re going to be nice to their owner. People who train and breed dogs to kill each other for entertainment are going to have no problem immediately bringing the dog that pisses them off out back and shooting them.
Fighters do not need to be taught to fight.
This is where I recognize that you are making stuff up. You lost me here…
If I were to be attacked by a dog the last one I’d choose is a pitbull or any muscular mastiff. They’re dangerous because they have the highest potential for damage.
And my wife’s hairdresser has a vizla that bit her daughter’s face and caused her to get 100+ stitches and she’ll be scarred forever. Dogs can bite without warning regardless of the breed.
On the flip side of the argument, I have a pit mix and she’s the sweetest thing in the world. Never has bitten anything other than a toy, and she doesn’t even bark unless she gets the zoomies while playing. She’s been great with my 2 year old nephew, too. Got her from the shelter when she was about a year and a half old. She’s 50% pit, so I feel like if it was genetic she’d be way more aggressive.
Obligatory dog pic:
The amount of lack of self awareness in this post…
Yet.
She has not bitten anyone yet. She might never. Or she might suddenly lose it and kill a child. That’s not something that ever happens in breeds like labs.
She’s sweet to you because people who breed and train dogs to kill for entertainment have no trouble killing any dog that pisses them off.
I think you should follow that last sentence with a description of why that matters. I know by inference, but some may miss your point that by “killing any dog that pisses them off” they were selectively breeding for obedience to the alpha to the exclusion of all else. And then maybe extrapolate on how that trait translates into fierce loyalt to one individual which makes everything else a potential target for attack.
You’re correct. Thanks for the clarification.
Uh that absolutely does happen with labs. It can happen with any breed. I’ve volunteered in rescue for years, and when I was working at a shelter, I interacted with hundreds of dogs, and the only time I was ever truly scared was with one particular lab. I don’t hold it against the breed as a whole, because it was his issue, but people need to be aware that any dog can bite and take proper precautions.
The lab should have been put down as well.
I think he may have been - he didn’t bite me, but when multiple volunteers refused to take him out because his body language read imminent attack, they pulled him for further behavioral evaluation. I don’t know what happened, but he wasn’t cleared in the time I was there. I’m not even sure why he was on the adoption floor to start with.
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That’s a dangerous way to think. There was a story about a golden retriever killing a baby in its carrier a few years back. The family said the dog had always been sweet and friendly, and the infant was too small to have done something like pull a tail or poke an eye.
I love dogs, I can’t imagine living without at least one and working with others, but way too many people assume that having a “safe” breed means nothing will happen. The vast majority of the time, everything is ok, but every now and then, a friendly dog bites someone in the face.
In the US, Pit Bulls caused 65% of dog bite deaths between 2005 and 2016.
About 15 years ago I volunteered with a pitbull rescue, then did a bunch of research on pitbull attacks in grad school. The problem then was that most statistics like this were unreliable once you saw what they labeled a pitbull. In most cases it was just any “mutt” was considered a pitbull. I don’t know if things have changed, never really looked into it since then, but I’m still a bit wary of stats like this without knowing their data is accurate.
Actually it’s more likely a pitt is labeled incorrectly like a lab etc to get them adopted to people too ignorant to know better. So that’s gonna invalidate that statement.
I remember when climate change deniers were not sure about the science either…
Being skeptical of data and their sources is a fundamental part of science.
were?
And it’s probably worse if you do rate by breed.
But I suspect that it’s mostly due to a combination of breed and neglect/non-training. The kind of people who want a pit bull in particular, and the kind of people who just chain up their dog outside and never train or socialize it, probably have significant overlap.
Wrong. You’re misrepresenting the stats. You’re leaving out the fact that in over half of all dog bites the breed is unknown.
Also, in studies where vet personnel are asked to visually identify the breed of dog, they are wrong two out of three times. So if vet personnel can’t even do it, dog bite victims, police reports, and hospital reports, from where these statistics on dog bites are obtained, are definitely not getting right.
The truth is that we have absolutely zero legitimate idea what dogs are causing injuries. Even if the numbers on pitbulls were accurate, the breed is unreported in more than half of cases, which statistically speaking means there could be another breed of dog that you’ve never even heard of that’s responsible for more than half of all bites.
The other issue for me is the inherent racism by those who advocate for these policies. In every conversation, it eventually devolves to the proponent of breed bans doing one of two things: admitting that they are targeting certain types of people, not breeds, and arguments that rely on false assertions of history, genetic and behavioral science, that are identical to those put forth by eugenicists. The easy example is the false assertions that pitbulls were “bred for fighting.”
They were bred for hunting and loyalty to their families and children. The guy to originally bred them wrote several books which you can read on Google Books and discusses at length their loyalty to people and kids as a primary characteristics, moreso than any violence. It was their strength and determination that made them useful for hunting, not aggression.
They were used only for dog fighting decades after the big game hunting they were bred to do was banned, and even then, dogs that showed aggression to humans were banned from the “sport” if not outright euthanized.
The studies that you would cite to support your “you can’t tell a breed by its look” also tend to show that people are quite accurate at identifying that one of the many breeds that are called pit bulls are present in a particular dog. in other words, they can’t accurately say “this is a pure bred Staffordshire Terrier” but they can say, “this is a pit bull” and they’re correct, unless you’re playing stupid semantic games.
I don’t see where the study says that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331500310X
That study seems to state a conclusion precisely the opposite of what the experimental results were. Based on a small sample set, there’s a high degree of match, far more accurate than random chance, between the observations and the genetic findings.
And yet still wrong two thirds of the time.
Of the 25 dogs identified as pit bull-type dogs by breed signature, 12 were identified by shelter staff as pit bull-type dogs at the time of admission to the shelter (prior to the study visit), including five labeled American Staffordshire terrier mix, four pit bull mix, two pit bull, and one American Staffordshire terrier. During the study, 20/25 dogs were identified by at least one of the four staff assessors as pit bull-type dogs, and five were not identified as pit bull-type dogs by any of the assessors. …
Of the 95 dogs (79%) that lacked breed signatures for pit bull heritage breeds, six (6%) were identified by shelter staff as pit bull-type dogs at the time of shelter admission, and 36 (38%) were identified as pit bull-type dogs by at least one shelter staff assessor at the time of the study visit
So, at intake, 18 dogs were identified as pit bulls but only 2/3rds were at least 12% pit bull.
During the study, 56 dogs were identified as being pit bulls, but only about 1/3rd were in fact at least 12% pit bull.
This is the classic ‘base rate fallacy’. The false positive rate isn’t that high, and the false negative rate isn’t that high either. But because the true positive rate is pretty low, the ratio of true positives to false positives is much worse than you’d intuitively think.
Tests for rare diseases and attempts to behaviorally profile terrorists at airports runs into the same problem. Sometimes, a 99.9% accurate test just moves you from searching for a needle on a farm to a needle in only a single haystack.
Yeah that study probably relied on faulty data. Most dog bite data just the person what the breed was.
Did tou know putbull is not 1 breed but 3 different ones.
Most people cant reliably tell an american pitbul from other breeds in a line up.
Actually, “pitbulls” are now well over a dozen different breeds people just randomly consider “pitbulls”
If it’s a stocky mutt with short hair . It’s a pitbull!
Did you know that all of the breeds that are identified by the name “pit bull” rate high in aggression? And that the same studies that pitbull afficianados cite for “you can’t tell a breed by appearance” also support the idea that when people call a dog a “pit bull” based on morphology alone, that the dog stands a very high chance of having decended from one of the several breeds identified as a pit bull?
Not in the study i reaf. They lined pure American pitbull and some pitbull mutts and dogs with no pitbull. They only to reliably guees who was the pitbull, even counting the mutt as pb, was if the dog was showing teeth.
I can see an argument for the proposition that maybe we don’t need dogs that are big and powerful enough to injure or kill people.
But, I take claims about how a breed “is gentle” with an entire ocean of salt- individual dogs might be calm and well-trained or socialized, it’s the ones churned out of puppy mills to be sold at top dollar to shitty people who want a tough, scary dog that seem to be sketchy.
I’ve been around lots of well-adjusted big dogs that are just big hunks of love and slobbery affection, but really I hate seeing stories about how some dog that “is a good boy” mauled a child and if I had my druthers, dog owners would be required to carry liability insurance proportionate to the dog’s size or bite force or some factor correlating to its breed, and to the dog owner’s income or wealth. Oh, that would make big, dangerous dogs too expensive to own? Maybe they should be.
In the US most home insurance policies charge more or require and additional rider for some breeds of dog because of the increased liability. If you have a “dangerous breed” and don’t notify your insurance company, you might not have the liability insurance you thought you did.
I had only pits when we got our insurance and they were not an issue.
Not saying it doesn’t happen. When we rented we had to find places that would allow the breed.
Edit: breed was never an issue with renters insurance either.
I have a lab. She’s 30kg and the textbook “good girl” - a decent depiction of the breed standard.
I got her because her terperment was semi predicted in line with her breed, but I still have public liability insurance and don’t let her approach kids because she’s still a dog.
It would also put an undue burden on people who need larger dogs for medical reasons…
It would be pretty easy to make an exception for those cases
Pitbull isn’t a breed, it’s a colloquialism that is used as a catch-all for any breed with a certain look. They’re either American bullys, American pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, Staffordshire bull terriers, American bulldogs, or a mix of these breeds. If you aren’t collecting separate data for each of these breeds individually, then the best we can do is divide the total number of bites between those breeds by 5.
Dog breeds are defined separately for a reason, you can’t just lump them together, ban 5(6 if you include mixes) breeds of dog, then think the dog bite issue is solved. Assholes who buy dogs only to isolate and ignore and/or mistreat them, will just choose the next most aggressive breed, then treat them the same. Statistically, that will mean that German shepherds will be the next banned breed, as they routinely come up as the second most deadly specific breed of dog. Say goodbye to your GS.
Man you nailed it, in today’s world. But there definitely was an American pitbull breed and there still is but all these designer and backyard breeders fucked it all up. It’s been a while since I’ve looked into this but either the AKC or UKC would list them officially.
Thank God they’re focusing on the worst hardships that are being inflicted on the British people.
When the UK has had such a massive increase in KSI rates they have to act. As Gregorum said they can deal with more than one issue, even feckless fucks like ours.
On no, my sweet velvet hippo wouldn’t hurt a fly! Says the pitbull owner as it eats what is left of grandma.
Edit: different terminology… but bullyism is a thing so I’m gonna leave it up.
Bullies are a genetic anomaly that aren’t just pitbulls. For example, Wendy is a somewhat famous bully whippet:
Most responsible breeders don’t allow for pairings that would create it. Mostly because if they get too excited they have heart attacks- their heart can’t keep up.
It should be banned, but not because it makes dogs more violent than they otherwise would be.
Basically it comes from over breeding for muscle mass. It crops up in racing breeds mostly- whippets and greyhounds. But also, apparently, in beef cattle:
Hippos are extremely dangerous and viscious.
Ugh, please go back to Reddit with that attitude
On a public forum? You can kiss my ass.
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The attitude of a joke?
I’m just curious, when the UK banned pit bulls, did the government just go around and round up everyone’s suddenly illegal dogs and put them all down?
How many breeds does the UK propose to ban?
Fucking hell. Remind me to stay the hell away from the UK.
These should remind you to stay away from many countries/states:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed-specific_legislation#Canada
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed-specific_legislation#United_States
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed-specific_legislation#Central_and_South_America
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed-specific_legislation#Republic_of_Ireland
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed-specific_legislation#Other_European_countries
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed-specific_legislation#Asia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed-specific_legislation#Oceania
We’re better off without you, no fucking worries there mate.
Indeed you are.
Depends how many children they kill.
That’s not fair at all.
Sometimes they just maul the children’s faces until they’re permanently disfigured.
Unless it’s the right kind of children. Then the UK would demand everyone get that breed. If only there was a dog specifically associated with massive profits from the slave trade and horrible racism.
I mean fuck the empire but if you’re gonna throw that shit down it feels only fair to mention the part where they also stopped the slave trade using force.
Well, that’s certainly the part they like to talk about constantly isn’t it?
So they shouldn’t ban dog breeds because racists exist? Weird take.
I pulled a muscle trying to pretzel my brain around that, too.
I mean that picture wasn’t chosen intentionally…
Reality is pitties are a protection breed like GSDs, Rotties, dobermans.
The main difference is those breeds are expensive. Pits have become the poster child for uncontrolled breeding among people who often specifically raise them to be aggressive. They are probably by FAR the most populous breed in cities in the US. It’s easy to have the most dog attacks when you’re the most popular bread.
I honestly don’t think most pits are any more dangerous than any large bread. And banning pits isn’t going to help the issue. Which is the people raising them to be aggressive and breeding them uncontrollably. They’ll just switch to another breed.
Shhhh, people would prefer to be emotional about this topic and base their views on anecdotes and media fearmongering. Please take your reason and logic elsewhere.
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Bengal cats ought to be banned too. They’re wild animals, not domesticated pets.
A dog is a dog, and they all have some serious ability to do harm in the face of a weaker opponent like children or the elderly, there needs to be laws to make the owners liable for any damage caused and make them get time for it. that way owner will be more responsible. or discourage them from getting dogs in the first place
I dont know why you’re getting so downvoted. You’re basically talking about something we’d expect in anything else that needs health and safety laws (eg when walking past scafolding, or having a handrail on a staircase). We used to have dog licensing in this country. I’m not that authoritarian in my ideologies, but I can see some real benefits in having such a scheme back, but also going further as having mandatory training, Police checks on security, etc… if not for the safety of the dog to prevent neglect. I remember seeing dogs neglected badly back on the estates in the 80s. It was fucking awful and its bad that it still goes on. Relying on private prosecution by people like the RSPCA isnt really appropriate when talking about life.
I find it particularly hilarious that England calls these American bully XL, while America calls them Staffordshire Terriers. Wonder which state of the US these were native to. America is well known for cultivating dog breeds over hundreds of years. England exporting shit and then relabeling it and pointing fingers is nothing new I guess.
They’re not staffies, though.
They’re the same dog, it’s just been selectively bread for muscle mass and jaw size. Plus the assholes who breed them for that purpose like to clip the ears and doc the tails so they look more different than they should.
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/dog-breeds/american-staffordshire-terrier-history-amstaff/
They’re not, though, they’ve been cross-bred to fuck.
Assholes breed dogs for muscle mass and size is kind of what I just said. Thanks for agreeing with me?
You said they’re the same dog. If they’re cross-bred, they have other breeds mixed in. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
So they bred a dog with a dog that looks like a dog to make a dog that still looks like the dog you say? Impressive how it still looks like a more muscular version of the same dog after all that.
So you’re just fucking stupid, then, lmao
Seriously, though, the wiki page is really easy to find:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_BullyThe breed is based on pitbulls, and has a bunch of other breeds mixed in. So they’re not staffies, have never been staffies, and you’re just making yourself look like a fucking moron.
Why doesn’t that include every breed of dog ever then? Since every breed is exactly that.
I’ll let my lazy tub of lard know that she’s a “lethal danger” next time she waddles over to a new visitor shes never met and lays down with her head in their lap
I’ll let the dead kids know your dog is harmless.
Their dog hasn’t killed anyone, what’re you talking about?
That’s the equivalent of me blaming you for every murder ever committed by another human being.
All humans are one species. We have no breeds. Now if the government genetically modified some humans to indiscriminately murder for no reason then you could blame that “breed” of humans, yes.
Unironically a racist dog whistle…
Them telling me their dog is harmless is fucking meaningless, what’re you talking about?
That’s the equivalent of me telling people that no human would ever murder because I know this one guy that’s never murdered.
It’s the equivalent of you telling me that a specific person you know personally would never kill anyone.
Telling me that your mom, for example, would never hurt anyone, isn’t a crazy meaningless statement to make. You probably know your mom pretty well.
If the other commenter said “no dog would ever hurt anyone” then yeah, you’d be right. But that’s not what they said.
lmao, my mum wasn’t bred for violence, bro, gtfo. I’m glad my country keeps dangerous dogs out of peoples’ hands.
Oh you sweet summer child you sweet and innocent summer child you have absolutely no idea do you. I guarantee you your mother was just as you were just as I was. We murdered every single other hominid. We butchered the Dezavonians and the Neanderthals. Then we committed to several hundred thousand years of warfare against the last remaining hominid, other homosapiens. We are the violence monkeys. As far as I’m aware we have only seen humans and certain other great apes commit to sustained generational warfare. Just because we stand up walk around and put on clothes and talk to each other doesn’t mean we’re not vilant unpredictable animals. It doesn’t mean we’ve lost a capacity for violence far exceeding any dogs ability.
You sound like you make your livelihood off the blood of those dumb enough to buy the dogs you’ve immorally bred.
Nature vs nurture my friend - we have no idea how much of that breeding actually affects their psychology. This has been debated for god only knows how long.
Some slaves were also bred for violence. So, by your own logic, we should ban all of their ancestors as well right?
Lol were they? Because I severely doubt they realized that humans aren’t anywhere near as primitive as a dog and yoy can’t just breed violence into a human like that. It takes generations of foxes to be bred to be docile, it would take 100 years or so to get any wanted result in a human.
Humans are not fucking dogs you degenerate cunt. Why do pointers point without being taught? Why do herding dogs herd? Millennia of selective breeding with an animal that is known for having highly adaptable genetics. Fuck right off.
Dogs, when involved in killings, are identified by FIRST RESPONDERS or POLICE OFFICERS, not by anyone with ANY KNOWLEDGE OF DOG BREEDS OR HUSBANDRY
We DO NOT HAVE AN ACCURATE COUNT on which breeds commit the most violence because THE PEOPLE REPORTING THE BREEDS OFTEN DO NOT HAVE QUALIFICATIONS TO DETERMINE BREEDS
Generic Street Dogs and any medium sized mutt CAN BE and ARE MISIDENTIFIED AS PITBULLS. Unless first responders, the police, and other people recording dog violence learn how to actually identify dog breeds, INNOCENT DOGS AND FAMILY MEMBERS WILL BE GENOCIDED FOR NO JUSTIFIABLE REASON
What a weird thing to come out with. Someone has suffered a terrible injury and you’re concerned with a bloody DNA test.
Wanting to exterminate an entire breed of dogs is the harder solution than actually figuring out the cause of the attacks
