The home secretary is seeking "urgent advice" about banning American XL Bully dogs as footage shows one of the animals attacking an 11-year-old girl and a man in Birmingham. Suella Braverman has said the animals are a "clear and lethal" danger after the video of the attack in Bordesley Green emerged on the social media platform TikTok. West Midlands Police are investigating after two men, who were bitten and left with injuries to their shoulders and arms, were taken to hospital to be treated for their injuries after the incident on Saturday.
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.
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.