"Pit-bull type dog licks baby’s face!"
"Vicious-looking pitbull plays with kitten!"
"Pitbull and spaniel gambol happily in local park!"
Nah, those headlines stink; let’s find a nasty pitbull story.
"Car doesn’t run stop sign-avoids accident!"
"Man doesn’t rob bank!"
"Asteroid goes nowhere near the Earth!"
Nah, those headlines stink; let’s report the news.
** “Lab bites child” **
Well that’s a pretty good story but nobody is scared of Labs. Besides everyone knows Labs don’t bite. It was probably mixed with a pitbull those dogs are vicious. And bites sounds pretty boring.
** Pitbull mauls child. **
God almighty I feel like I’m starting to preach and lecture here, but this discussion won’t leave my brain. I was reading back over the conversation and there’s a concept that I’ve been trying to express that I don’t think I’ve been doing a very good job of. I am concerned that I’ve been leaning too hard on the concerns of “danger” with dogs, and I have not done a very good job at addressing the behavioral piece of the discussion.
I said before that I do not ascribe qualities of “positive” or “negative” to animal behaviors, and that animals are not “good” or “bad”. I also said that dogs bite, that’s just what dogs do, you can’t blame 'em for it, and that all dogs can bite, all dogs can kill. I want people to understand that I’m not trying to argue that all dogs are inherently vicious, that all dogs are potentially “bad”.
I can’t say that… because dogs don’t bite because they’re bad. I think a lot of people imagine that dogs who bite are evil, that a canine mouth doing damage to human flesh only stems from mental damage, or inherent canine character flaws. That a dog must be unstable or damaged to bite. That’s just not so, and dispelling that notion is exactly why I’m feeling so hyped up about dispelling what may seem on the surface as a seemingly innocent stereotype (really, who cares if someone wants to walk around thinking pit bulls are satanic?). It’s a stereotype that needs to be dispelled because if you are focusing on breed or phenotype as your primary identifier for canine safety (or chalking up invisible internal character flaws as the source of human aggression), you are focusing on the element of least concern in the prevention of dog bites… and I want people to live safely and happily with dogs.
I will not dispute that there is some element of genetics and breed background to determination of a dog’s potential safety, but that’s an extremely complex topic. It requires a significant functional knowledge of the roles these dogs were bred to fill, and the root drives behind the tasks they were required to perform on the job to really understand what makes a dog’s historic job influence its likelihood to put teeth on human skin. It’s a complex topic with a healthy dose of assumption and guesswork when you get to the finer points,* and then of course there’s the fact that you can throw any presumptions you have out the window when it comes to mixed-breed dogs,** and especially to random-source mixed breed dogs, which we now know are largely unidentifiable by phenotype anyway.
What I’m trying to say is, that dogs don’t bite because they’re evil or internally flawed. When dogs interact with humans, they are communicating the best way they can to a species that mostly isn’t listening. People claim all the time that the dog just bit out of nowhere, with no warning at all, but mostly… that’s just not true. The dog may have been warning for years without their owner understanding. Or maybe when the dog snapped at the kid’s face, the kid he grew up with and has spent many long and happy hours with, it’s because he was reacting the only way he knew how to resolve the situation he was in. Often it’s because the dog was startled, or hurt, or fearful.
Sometimes it’s because the dog was exploring his options for rising in the ranks in pack status, or acting on what he saw as his right to correct the child as an adult dog would a puppy, with a snap or a scruff shake.
Sometimes the dog has been trained to aggress toward humans for defense or protection, and the junkyard dog on the chain doesn’t know the difference between a stray toddler and a bad guy. All he knows is that he’s supposed to bite anything that’s not the one that feeds him. Sometimes it’s less direct training and more total neglect, like a dog left in isolation on a chain for years and years and years.
There are a lot of reasons dogs bite. In my grandpa’s day, if he got himself bit by a neighborhood dog, it would have been “Well, whose fault is that? What were you doing that you shouldn’t have been doing?” Now, it’s quarantine the dog and kill it for instability. It seems like people have to some extent forgotten that dogs are not people. When they act, they act as canids do, they react as canids do, they communicate as canids do. When one dog snaps at another, nips a cheek or gives a scruff-shake, it’s no big deal. It’s just dogs “talking”, interacting and communicating with each other. Children have softer skin, unprotected by fur. They are also, to an insufficiently trained dog, much closer to equal status on the totem pole, and thus open to correction and instruction. Mostly when dogs bite kids, it’s not because they’re bad dogs, it’s because they’re untrained or unsupervised dogs.
This is one major reason why demonization of any breed is such a big deal… even aside from the breed-specific legislation aspects of it. It makes people forget the basic fact of living with dogs: that dogs are dogs, they act as dogs do.
Dogs are wonderfully adaptive, and mostly they do an incredible job at living in a world completely dominated by a species that doesn’t always go far out of its way to speak their language… but sometimes they don’t have any better “words” at their disposal.
Freak dog attacks are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of bites happen with known dogs, and most happen because whether the person (most often a child) knows it or not, he did something which caused the dog to react. In nearly all cases, “bite incident” and “dog bite related fatality” alike, it’s due to improper supervision of dog and child, or insufficient training and handling of the dog in general. This is what my husband meant (in the snarkiest possible way) when he said “Dogs are dogs, and people are stupid.”
Breed is by no means the major precursor in dog attacks. Pit dogs are no more likely to attack a person than any other dog, and no more likely to severely injure or kill if they do attack. Living safely with dogs is far more about how you interact with and relate to them than about their breeding background.
Yup… definitely pounding the pulpit for dog bite prevention by now. What the hell. In the spirit of fighting ignorance…
*This is the discussion I’m trying to have with anyone who still wants to seriously contend that a dog’s pit fighting blood makes it more likely to engage in human-targeted aggression than any other breed. There are not many things I post at length about, because there isn’t a whole lot that I feel sufficiently educated about and experienced in to discuss at any length. This, however, is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time exploring. If anyone really does have a sincere interest in exploring what drives and inclinations make a dog more likely to put its teeth on a human I’ll be happy to engage, but this is already gonna be a long post, and no one making that accusation has been willing to put forth any supporting argument… yet, anyway.
**Reproducing behavior is not anything like as easy as reproducing physical traits (which isn’t real easy, either). People work lifetimes, even many human generations, to develop a line of dogs that consistently, or even routinely, exhibits a particular behavioral trait. In many high-functioning working breeds 10%, one or two out of every litter, is considered an exceptional success rate.
…AND ANOTHER THING! 
The concept of random-source mixed-breed dogs being generally unidentifiable doesn’t mean you can never tell two breeds of dogs apart, or that a pit bull mixed with a boxer is suddenly, magically, going to turn out puppies that look like poodles.
Mixed-breed dogs are rarely the accidental and random product of two known and excellent examples of intentionally-produced pedigreed dogs. They’re often many generations into random breeding when they show up at the shelter. The generic form that’s come to be known as “pit bull type” is kinda the distillation that happens when you have a random population of random-type dogs breeding randomly, with a healthy push in the direction of “bulldog type” caused by a population boom in pit-type dogs after the early HSUS/media frenzy.
Without the “bulldog” influence, what you get looks something like this.
It’s not hard to see what happens if you toss a glut of bulldog-type blood into the mix a few generations back, and how we’ve come to label just about every generic pound puppy a “pit bull type”.
In any case, the product of two different purebreds doesn’t always look anything like either parent, either. An F1 generation cross between a lab and a poodle does not give you a consistent “labradoodle”. Complicating the issue is that the general public can’t identify more than a dozen or couple dozen common breeds at most. Even in the professional dog world where presumably people have a better eye, people get away with all kinds of stupid things… like falsifying pedigrees and passing off one breed as another, or a mix as a purebred. Even a very practiced eye would likely have difficulty differentiating two dogs as separate breeds. Neither one is a pit bull, by the way.
One reason “pit bulls” show up so often in the roster of severe dog attacks is because the “pit bull type” is pretty much our default generic dog phenotype. Everything looks vaguely like a pit bull, a couple generations down the road, and everyone thinks they know what a pit bull looks like.
NajaNivea, thanks for your detailed, thoughtful, and well researched contributions to this thread. I hope you don’t mind if I alert you the next time this topic arises, because believe me, it will.
Let me share an anecdote. I adopted from rescue a 7 year old male Jack Russell who had lived with a caring family until they had a child. When the child was 2 years old the incident that led to him going into rescue happened. This is almost verbatim from the history I was given : Child backed dog into corner. Dog growled. Child kept coming. Dog bit child.
To their credit, I think the family realized that it was not his fault, but they also realized that they were unable or unwilling to monitor the situation until the child could be instructed in proper behavior around a dog. So Rex came to live with me, where until his death he was the sweetest most loving dog you could ever want. He did have what is sometimes called a “hard mouth.” If you poked your finger into his crate he would nip at it. Never hard enough to draw blood, but enough to get your attention. He simply didn’t like being backed into corners, and he didn’t like having his “den invaded”, although when he was sleeping in my bed all he cared about was snuggling as close as possible. I suspect, but don’t know, that that was the extent of the bite he gave the child, but the parents weren’t willing to take the chance.
This is exactly the kind of incident that gets recorded as “dog bites baby” without any concern for the particulars.
Having followed the “pit bull issue” now for 6+ years and examined many of the opinions on this particular thread, it has become increasingly apparent to me at least of the parallels this issue draws to other historical events where human beliefs / behaviors were deeply & tragically flawed.
Let me first state for the record that I’m NOT asserting a direct analogy between pit bulls and the plight of millions of people from say the Holocaust or American slavery/racism. Such comparisons are insensitive and tend to incite too much “off topic” debate. However, I do see remarkable similarities, especially around how fear, ignorance, myth, hate, and complacency can fuel state-sponsored movements to repress, exploit, or exterminate entire classes of beings.
In this case, the beings are a class of dogs. And, while acknowledging that laws do not afford pets the same rights & protections as humans, we nonetheless live in a society that tolerates, in fact sponsors, the mass extermination of an entire class of living beings, not based on individual behaviors but due to appearance and/or perceived genetic makeup. Does this not remind you of our shameful past? Do you not see something eerily similar between this image and this image?
I’m sure many of you feel wholly justified in your distaste for pit bulls and would never imagine such beliefs rose to the level of prejudicial or discriminatory. You come armed with CDC reports, a story or two about the neighbor’s pit bull, and some research off the web about fighting dogs … and Voila !!.. you’re ready to support state-sponsored extermination of multiple dog breeds or, at the very least, sit back complacently while it goes on in your hometown. But, ya know, there were millions of Germans who genuinely shared Hitler’s distaste for Jews and could cite you ‘scientific’ studies on why Jews were a threat to Aryan society. Likewise in the US, millions of Americans, many still alive, believe African Americans are inherently threatening to society and can cite you well-funded scientific studies and anecdotal evidence to that effect. A few of you out there should really be questioning whether you’re all that different from those believers … if not in hatred, then in fear, ignorance, or complacency.
To help make my point, go back & read some of the posts under this thread, but this time replace the words “pit bull” with “Jews” or “blacks”. Seems like a ridiculous idea until you realize how reminiscent it sounds of past times. It’ll read something like:
“Unless I know the Jew personally, I approach them with heightened caution”
“It’d suit me fine if all those mongrel blacks were dead & gone”
“I know a couple of nice Jews, but many can’t be trusted … they can turn on you without warning”
“I don’t support a ban on Jews, but my children probably are safer when they’re not around”
“Black slaves were bred for generations to do XYZ, thus we can only assume that XYZ is their natural tendency”
“I know they say that blacks only present a miniscule threat to me, but I still teach my school kids to be extra careful around them”
“I’m not buying it … Everyone knows the blacks are more dangerous than whites … hell, just look at 'em”
Again, I’m not equating dogs to humans, and I don’t hold myself above the occasional unfair generalization. Rather, I’m pointing out that the underlying rhetoric/illogic used in support of anti-pit bull mindsets (at least on this Board) is deeply, deeply flawed and would never pass the sniff test if the discussion were about humans. It would be considered patently ignorant, discriminatory, and illegal. And one need NOT support BSL to necessarily fall into this category!
I’m optimistic that in due time this BSL absurdity will reverse itself, as will the pathetic rationales that support/tolerate it, but only time will tell how long until we as a society have that embarrassing “Oh Shit, look at what we’ve done” moment that future generations will look back with shame & amazement.
Contrapuntal, you are welcome, I’m glad you think the words are useful. Thanks for Rex’s story, too. And thanks to Biggirl for the “and another thing!” line 
One of my own that didn’t quite make it into the novel above:
A friend of mine owns a rottweiler. One day, the dog was sleeping in the house while she was out in the back yard with a repair guy. A friend of hers stopped by with her three-year-old in tow, comes in through the front door, sets the child down, and walks through the house looking for my friend (the dog’s owner). Mom walks through the house to the back yard, leaving the kid wandering around the house, and neglecting to tell the dog’s owner the kid was there.
A few minutes later, kid starts screaming, mom runs back into the house and finds the kid with a scrape on the cheek. Mom says “what happened?” and the kid says he was trying to give the doggie a flower and the doggie bit him. Mom gets hysterical, hauls the kid off to the ER (I think the outcome was a bandage, though I could be wrong about that–possibly there was one suture involved), and sure enough the dog’s owner gets a series of calls from mom and Animal Control about the vicious, child-attacking rottweiler.
Now, who knows what happened? Maybe the dog was sleeping and the kid did a belly-flop on him and scared the crap out of him. Maybe he had cornered the dog, and was trying to poke the flower into the dog’s mouth or nose or eyes or ear and the dog gave him a warning shot out of irritation or pain. Who knows? Not me, not mom, and not the dog’s owner, but what I can say is this: if that dog had wanted to hurt that child, the kid would have experienced more than jaws clicking and a tooth grazing his cheek. This is not a scenario where a dog bit a child with intention to cause harm.
And of course, mom demands that her friend kill her dog, and even sends the cops to try and be sure it gets done. With no concern for the particulars, there’s another “vicious rottweiler bites baby in face” story which will get spread all around mom’s circle of friends.
On preview: people fighting in the trenches against breed specific legislation do frequently make comparisons between the pit bull killings as a holocaust and the Holocaust. I generally avoid drawing a direct parallel, because while people can understand the absurdity of “a stupid canine racial stereotype”, bringing the big H word into the discussion rarely ends well. People start arguing about that, and forget what they were debating in the first place
The woman who was screaming about putting the dog down was guilty of child neglect, plain and simple. She just abandons it and leaves the house? There are about a hundred other bad things that could have happened to that kid, dog or no dog.
I have a Rottweiller who by all accounts is the poster girl for how sweet those dogs can be. Everyone who meets her falls in love with her. Her main concern is how many ear scratches she can get form any random stranger who happens by. She is as gentle as a lamb. My vet has offered to write a letter of reference attesting to that fact.
Having said that, I would never allow her to be unsupervised with a 3 year old. And probably not even if she was supervised. She is a big strong girl who likes to play. She could easily harm a child by jumping on her, or running into her, or swiping at her with her paw. It’s just common sense.
Yes, btdt … hence my early & clear disclaimer. But in the absence of any well supported arguments from the other side, I found myself reviewing the ones we do have on this Board … and, well, if the shoe fits. I also think too many people come on here not realizing where their seemingly harmless anti-pit bull sentiment can lead. But again, just to be clear, my intention is to parallel flawed patterns of reasoning behind such events, not the events themselves.
…speaking of which…
(feel free to read this in the worst Joe Pesci impersonation you can imagine):
I would love to hear this.
NajaNivea said:
Whoa! I have exactly 1 friend that I have explicit permission to enter his house on my own, and even then I tend to knock as I enter. I certainly wouldn’t set a 3 year old down alone and wander off, especially if that person has a dog. Nevermind that the dog is the sweetest thing ever, 3 year olds create their own disasters.
Naja -
You may be one of the few on here who can appreciate this recent NY Times article.
We have all the makings of a “new” demon of society … CDC reports, 20+ deaths per year, ‘multiple cattle’ attacks, previous history of aggression, “purposeful attacks”, young & old victims. Let the public outrage begin.
Doesn’t surprise me one bit. Anyone who doesn’t have adequate respect for an animal weighing 1000+ lbs. needs to get some. Bulls are well known man-killers, flinging them about like a childs rag doll while goring them in half and trampling the bits to bloody pulp. Is it such a stretch to think the female variety is not completely harmless when agitated? I was fishing a man made pond with cattle around it once, and I kept a healthy distance and one eye open.
Only one? How did you bait your hook?
Many parents, especially young one’s, simply don’t fully realize the extent of their responsibility. I see kids unsupervised all the time at ages and in circumstances that give me indigestion. I once stopped and honked because there was an unsupervised toddler wandering in the street. I got out and called out as well. The child was a little frightened of me and went back into the driveway, which was fine by me. When a parent finally came out to collect the child, I got one of the nastiest looks you can imagine for my trouble. Not a word of thanks my way and he ignored my attempt to tell him what happened. Nice.
I meant that I just kept one eye on the cow. Haven’t you ever heard of Walleyed fishing?
Kenyth said:
No fucking shit.
That’s absurd to anyone whos been around pit bulls…I’ve never seen a cocker spaniel attack another dog or person.Dachshund?Yea i’d be just as worried my 5 year old will be mauled and killed by them as a pit bull…Thats logical…I’m embarrassed for you :oPit bulls on the other hand i’ve witnessed more vicious attacks on dogs and yes a few on people than i can count…A statistical anamoly?I know it’s not.You discount every study that says they are by far and away the most vicious breed out there as misidentification…lol…how convenient…
That’s got to be one of the longest posts ever ,especially since you were just defending najanivea…I’m far too busy to read all that …sorry