You might have a point there if you had more evidence than just your observations. The information that can be examined is incomplete and inconclusive, but it does show some correspondence between frequency of attacks and the popularity of breeds, and a pretty strong correspondence between size and severity of attacks. Perhaps if more information were available we might see a blip on the charts when it comes to Pit Bulls, but so far, aside from anecdotes, there’s nothing to indicate Pit Bulls are more dangerous than many other breeds.
Thank you.
I was born and raised in Bridgeport, CT. Not generally known to be a genteel community. In my younger days I spend a great amount of my time in what could charitably be called “bad neighbourhoods.” I must say I observed no violent dog incidents that drew any blood from persons or other dogs during my time in that city. But that was before Pitties became the thug’s dog of choice.
My wife and I moved to one of the New Haven suburbs about twenty-two years ago. My daughters had both volunteered at the local animal shelter, and we are “dog people.” I have not noticed any violent dog incidences in that time and we do have a habit of putting ourselves into dog-rich environments.
Just another data point.
Actually we’ve had a lot of problems in my area dog park(s)s with Pit Bulls. I have no way of knowing how they were raised so I can’t comment on that but you can see the other dog owners cringe when someone shows up with one. You’d think if owners were abusive and chaining their dogs up they wouldn’t go to the effort of taking them to a dog park but who knows.
And this is what I’ve tried to tell owners. These are the people who end up surprised that their dog caused a 50 stitch wound. I’m not sure what the technical term is but pit bulls are very dog loyal to their owners in a hierarchical way. They see humans as the top of the list. they act almost cowardly around their owners in a very submissive manner. The difference, and I can’t emphasize this enough, is the moment when the dog snaps at something. Most dogs will bite and release if startled or ill. A child might get a puncture wound. A pit bull will grab and tear.
I’m not communicating my position well. It’s the nature of the attack that makes them more dangerous, not the frequency. It’s what they do in the first few seconds that, in my observation, does the most damage. I’ve seen many of them attack other family dogs and within seconds of owners intervening they have that overly submissive look on their face. Not to read too much human emotion into it but it’s as if they realized they fucked up. But the damage is done. The other dog is now on the way to the vet for stitches. I see the most gentle of dogs nip and growl at each other from time to time. No harm no fowl. A bit of alpha dog behavior to be expected.
Bolding mine.
Again, you have never heard of the French face transplant woman? You’ve never heard of any attacks/maulings/deaths by any other breed?
Every pit bull owner you’ve known has had to have the dog “destroyed”?
There IS a higher level of aggression bred into some dogs. Nobody is disputing that.
Pit bulls, Rottweilers, Shar Peis, Filas, Akitas, Tosa Inus, Presa Canarios etc and etc are not dog park dogs. They need more training and supervision than other breeds. They have a high tendency to be aggressive towards other dogs and can do more damage than a poodle and should be managed appropriately.
Unfortunately, around here at any rate, they’re the ghetto dog of choice.
I know lots of people with pit bulls/bully breeds or mixes and don’t know anyone whose dog has attacked anyone. I can think of only one that had to be put down - sadly, it was a case of a witless owner (mother of a friend of mine) who had five dogs and umpteen cats. None of the dogs ever got much in the way of training and rarely left the property. She thought it was a good idea to get a pit bull puppy two years ago; as he matured (never neutered, either) he started going after the other two male dogs in the house (one intact, one neutered) and then killed a cat. Never a bit aggressive with people though, even with frequent grandkids in the house. But the animal-aggression was getting out of hand so she had him pts.
But he was a perfectly nice dog who would have been fine most likely in a different setting. Anyone bringing in a fifth dog - a pit bull no less - into a house with four other dogs and about ten cats and not doing one lick of training was asking for trouble. When I was fostering dogs, no WAY would I have let this woman have another animal.
I think this thread has moved into IMHO territory.
I don’t think I’m following your argument here. Are you under the impression that the children in those photos were all savaged as soon as the flash went off?
YMMV but I haven’t noticed “cringing” as a particularly marked trait in the pit bulls I’ve met. There’s in nothing in their background or DNA to make them significantly different than other dogs in this respect.
If I was going to pick a word to describe the pit bulls of my acquaintance, it would be “unflappable”.
All the terriers tend to do that, actually. They grab their target and try to shake it to death. There’s nothing unique about the pit bull types in that regard.
It’s been almost two hundred years since bull baiting was a common activity. It was never really a common sport, anyway, here in the colonies (since you need a bunch of surplus bulls). Since then, pit bulls have made a living as a companions and working terriers. It’s only in the last decade or so that they’ve acquired this reputation for being savage man-eaters. Instead, they were more commonly known for being the best choice for children.
They were bred to be family dogs, and were highly regarded in that role, far more recently than they were bred to be bull dogs. That’s their far more recent heritage than their fighting days.
Now, Airedales, that’s a different story. Never met one I felt I could trust.
I do understand what you are saying, and you may be correct. But there isn’t really evidence to draw a conclusion. Other dogs do behave in the way you describe, but that class of behavior may reduce the number of dangerous breeds. Now if you are limiting this to danger that Pit Bulls present to other dogs, it makes even more sense. It’s not an exclusive for Pit Bulls, but there is a factor of how dog interaction goes when it does not go well.
I believe his argument is that the nanny qualities of the dog lead owners into a false sense of security re: their animal attacking other people since they only see the dog on its best behavior.
This is a better than average internet discussion of ‘pit bulls’ or bully breed dogs. There has been some BS and ‘Ive observed’ comments pretty obviously based on little if any actual knowledge of dogs, but still better than a lot of such discussions.
These are some relevant points IMO, none brand new:
-a lot of laymen’s impressions of ‘pit bulls’ are really impressions of bully breed owners, or more accurately a particular kind of common owner low on the socio-economic and high on the underclass social dysfunction scales. As with many social statistics in the US (dog attacks are a social phenomenon: ultimately people are responsible for dogs), it’s meaningless to construct averages without taking into account the skew toward socially dysfunctional groups. Such groups are involved in a disproportionate % all negative social phenomena. Stating this fact does not identify a solution; some make similar statements as if just stating this truth points to a realistic solution. It doesn’t, but OTOH ignoring this truth and dealing in averages of social statistics (dog bites, student test scores, you name it) in the US often results in meaningless discussion. So even if the breed identification in dog attack stats were reliable (the CDC has concluded they aren’t), it would still be meaningless to compare among breeds without correcting for which breeds which classes of people tend to own.
-by the same token, people pushing BSL’s which would deny everyone the right to own certain (and often arbitrarily defined) ‘dangerous’ breeds should be able to show that their ‘observations’ really apply to eg. dogs adopted out of shelters into middle class homes. I’m 99% sure, by my own experience, that that’s a load of crap, and ‘pit bulls’ from shelters in responsible homes have no greater tendency whatsoever to be involved in serious human aggression issues than any other relatively large and strong breed (yes of course tiny dogs are less capable of harming people). Can I prove this statistically? no, but I’m not the one proposing reducing other people’s rights.
-anyone with any real knowledge of dogs agrees with earlier posts stating the obvious fact that guard and herding breeds are a lot more likely to be human aggressive (to strangers particularly) left to their own devices than bully breeds. This should be too obvious to even have to debate. But again bully breeds are more likely to be owned by people who try to mis-train them to be guard/intimidation dogs. Or more likely at least until some Rube Goldberg attempt to address the problem by banning certain breeds: the bad actors can just switch to other breeds. There’s no shortage of big dog breeds which can be trained to be human aggressive.
-the ‘observation’ that bully breed dogs ‘attack without warning’ is crap as a generalization. They are among the most guileless dogs in general, and their mood shows very directly. Our current bully has at least 5 easily diagnosed and distinct levels of agitation (line appears on her neck, certain tuft rises on her tail, sub steps of hair rising on her upper back, two distinct levels of vocalization) she has to pass before lunging at another dog. She doesn’t have any human aggressive tendencies at all, nor do virtually any of the bullies I’ve encountered, in an area where lots of middle class people have them, and among those available for adoption at the shelter I volunteer at. Responsible shelters don’t adopt out any other kind. And no my dog is not going to ‘snap’ someday, that whole idea is also BS. Of course people who have dogs they know are HA, or were even proud were HA before somebody got hurt, say ‘oh it just snapped’. BS, such dogs virtually always showed signs of it before, dogs are dogs. Mystical mysterious ‘pit bulls’ is BS, they’re also dogs.
-yes bully breed dogs are especially strong for their size, though not especially big. APBT’s are not big dogs at all, though again ‘pit bull’ often refers to other breeds, and the people breeding dogs for fighting, or to look ‘scary’, are constantly changing the breeds they use. Our dog is at least part Dogo Argentino (a boar hunting breed much larger than an APBT), but actually did escape from a reputed fighting dog breeder.
-Dog fighting and deliberate creation of human aggressive dogs doesn’t not depend on any single breed being ‘allowed’. That whole idea is ‘barking up the wrong tree’.
This. Plus it seems to be human nature to ignore early warning signs of one’s own dog because it demands either the destruction of the animal or trying to find another owner willing to take on the risk.
And you can apply what I’m saying to any dog and any breed that exhibits the behavior. I just got done watching some PBS show about genetics and they talked about a “violent” gene. They can insert it into a mouse and it’s an instant candidate for the mouse version of Jerry Springer. According to the scientist describing the effects it’s not a guaranteed marker for anti-social behavior but it does magnify poor social conditions. So obviously an animal with this genetic predisposition is going to be worse if not properly raised around people or other dogs.
Pete from The Little Rascals was a pit bull.
No matter how you parse the numbers it takes a dose of willful ignorance to pretend that pit bulls aren’t significantly more dangerous than any other breed. In any given year they’re responsible for half or more of all the mauling deaths in the country despite being less than 5% of the dog population. That’s not a coincidence. And there’s no way to shade those numbers in one direction or another to change the basic fact that pit bulls many times more likely to kill than even rottweilers or German shepherds, the next two most dangerous breeds on the list. When you consider their body count against that of breeds like labs or collies the comparisons become ridiculous.
The common response from pit bull defenders falls into two areas: A)“It’s the owner not the breed” and B)“I’ve owned a pit bull for X years and it’s the sweetest dog ever.”
As for A: All dog breeds have their share of bad owners. But you don’t hear about schnauzers killing people.
As for B: That’s what every pit bull owner said right before his dog killed the baby. You reason that most pit bulls are sweet and gentle? You know what other breeds are mostly sweet and gentle? All of them. And most of the others weren’t bred to attack and kill.
The vast majority of pit bulls are indeed safe, but they’re still 20 times more likely to kill or maim than nearly any other breed. If you’re okay with those odds, then by all means turn your pit bull loose with your kids.
Even if you don’t want to trust the statistics, just consider it anecdotally. When you hear about a kid being mauled to death, how often is it NOT a pit bull?
-Breed designation in these reports is not reliable: the CDC has concluded so. That goes for statistics (of course including those on websites like ‘dogsbite’ some of which are fake, though repeated all over the web), and goes double for ‘anecdotal evidence’*
-Talking about Schnauzers and Chihuahua’s is a dodge (though small breed dogs can injure little kids). The issue is differentiating among comparably strong breeds. APBT’s per se aren’t that large, but are strong for their size, so it’s fair to compare them and other bully breeds to breeds like Rottweilers, Dobermans, German Shepherds, etc. not Schnauzers.
-A typical misunderstanding of the owner issue. The implicit assumption is some kind of uniform distribution of incidents, breeds and owner types, from which we can simply compare the relative incidence among breeds (again with the serious caveat from tendency for laymen to call any muscular short coat dog a ‘pit bull’ if it bites somebody). But the disproportionate majority of almost any negative social statistic occurs among a small proportion of the population. Back to your ‘anecdotes’ which human dog aggression incidents you ever read of don’t occur in poor minority or white trash neighborhoods? And in those neighborhoods, dogs that laymen call ‘pit bulls’ are more like 90% of the dogs than 5%
-Your B has a similar fatal flaw. It doesn’t compare what proportion of owners say their dog isn’t human aggressive before v after it’s involved in an human aggression incident. You say they say it before, but what media account of a dog aggression incident ever includes a quote from the owner before it happened? If you can assemble statistics showing a high incidence of HA in pit-type dogs adopted out of shelters to middle class owners who say their dogs aren’t HA before the fact, I’ll be all ears. OTOH of course trash owners say their dogs ‘never showed any sign of aggression’ after they bite somebody, though they ignored or were even proud that the dog was human aggressive before the sh*t hit the fan.
*A recent hilarious example I saw was a guy screaming ‘ban pit bulls’ next to his facebook icon, a picture of his big brindle mastiff-like dog with trimmed ears, that 90% of laymen would probably call a ‘pit bull’ if it bit somebody.
We had a small community of 300 homes, and one owner used his home to breed pit bull type dogs. We don’t even think he lived there, just used it to keep his dogs.
His fence was reasonably sturdy, but, sure enough, a bunch of young dogs, all the same litter, I think, got out and surrounded a man pushing his kid in a stroller as they passed by. Knowing that there had been reports of other attacks on small dogs in the neighborhood, and fearing for his child’s safety (if not his own), he shouted for help and held his kid on his shoulders while the dogs circled and snarled.
Finally, enough neighbors stepped up to intimidate the dogs. The owner was contacted and he quickly made repairs. The incident was reported to the police, who told us…
“Unless the owner was negligent, AND, the dogs bit someone, no charges could be pursued. Since there was no dogbite, no incident report would be filed.”
residents now go well out of their way to avoid the house, and tell their kids not to ride their bikes near that house.
I think this is pure nonsense. No one has the right to house one dangerous dog anywhere near my grandchildren, let along a pack.
The owner was informed anonymously that any future incidents would result in his house being destroyed. So far, so good.
Would you have felt better if it were a pack of poorly-socialized dogs of a different breed?
I find we keep repeating that it is the fault of the owner (who you describe as being neglectful) and not the dogs. Have you reported him for running a business in a residential area?
Well, isn’t that a lovely community.
depends on the breed. I can stomp a bunch of little wiener dogs dead even though they can be agressive. 2 pit bulls are a real problem. One Great Dane is a real problem.