Quacks like a duck, etc. I for one don’t care if a dog is a pure Staffordshire or any of the half dozen breeds and quasi-breeds that look like it, or the endless array of mutts that have been backyard-bred from that general stock; we all know a “pit bull” when we see one. I have nothing against any dog breed, but “pit bulls” have been the product of shitting breeding for “toughness,” if not outright viciousness, for a long time. If any vaguely macho guy is walking a dog… it’s a “pit.”
What that means is that unless you’re buying a purebred Staff or one of its kin from a long-time reputable breeder whose stock comes only from long-time reputable breeders, you’re like to get the result of breeding such purposely dangerous dogs, even if the last breeder was a mommy and daddy and two year old.
Triple that for any kind of rescue with unknown history. “Pit” reputation is not unearned… 90% because of their collective body of owners.
IMO, ( why I want more information ) I would not call them abusers if the dog gave no warning that it was getting upset. What does your experience with dogs tell you?
I personally do not subscribe to the notion that human mammals are sanctified just by existence over all mammals, or any life form actually. ( IMO, we claim that position by being the best killers the world has so far developed. I feel there are some very small bugs that are soon going to be better at it. But I digress. )
In my yard, my dogs indicates you should stop advancing and you not only continue but pick up something to threaten my dog with, even though you have not yet threatened a human on the property, well guess who I will shoot.
You buy a horse and then yank it’s tail and it objects but you crowd the horse, getting madder and meaner and the horse kicks you and that makes it a vicious horse in your world?
Being human, I have given myself the right to own any other being and to be able to kill it on any whim I might have, even for just being what it is. I can even make it, by force do something that is natural for it to do and them proclaim it a bad animal and other humans will turn a blind eye to the humans humaneness and help or cheer or agree with the destruction of any other creature that a person might own.
A lot of humans do not agree with this. In my yard they are a lot less likely to be harmed by me because they are not likely to abuse their position as the top killer on the planet. Human thought is supposed to make us better… Unfortunately, we have way too much arrogance to go with our powers. Bawahahaha
My ability to intellectualize
Allowed me to rationalize
Which got me institutionalized.
So this is how I try to operate my yard.
I never make the mistake of thinking my humanness is some kind of protective shield.
Because he mauled four people with what is unlikely to have been sufficient provocation. Biting someone because he didn’t like being bundled into the sweater, understandable. Going ballistic and attacking four people, two to the point of being hospitalized, is “vicious.”
While they might have been stupid and missed evident signs he was unhappy, I doubt they were provoking him to the point where just any dog would have gone off like that.
For all the dog attacks I read about, it seems to be the vague nonbreed “pit bulls” that maul the shit out of people, to the point of hospitalization, maiming or death. That’s different from getting bitten, even badly, by a Shepherd or Golden. Most breeds do not “blow a fuse” and attempt to destroy their target the way the pit-bred lines do. They’ll attack, and bite, and back off or run.
Not having been there I can obviously only speculate about what exactly happened. I love dogs as much as anybody but if one was mauling my parents and the story did mention that the Mother’s wounds were stable but serious, I think at that point I would do whatever it took to stop said dog including killing it but I would try not to kill it if it could be avoided. It probably was not very wise for the Mother to try and put the sweater on this potentially aggressive dog that they only owned for weeks, and I wonder in the back of my mind if maybe they were having a few holiday cocktails that evening and maybe she wasn’t picking up on the cues that I’m sure the dog gave off prior to the attack. However if she was acting foolishly prior to the attack at a certain point all that becomes moot when the dog has snapped and is seriously injuring your family and I won’t blame the son for his actions.
This well was poisoned before any “pittapologists” came into the thread.
There are at least two sweeping assumptions in your post. Firstly, the idea the dog went ballistic without provocation. We don’t know what they were doing to him, and he can’t tell his side of the story. It’s conceivable that the humans escalated the event bu striking him or whatever…people can be very savage in their treatment of animals, and abusers are not going to tell you they started it…they’ll say “he just snapped.”
Secondly, “the dog attacks I read about” is a hugely unscientific selection. See the National Canine Research Council’s damning media studies for some alarming examples of selection bias.
Most dogs in pit-bred lines do not simply “blow a fuse”, either. They give warning signs first and too many people do not recognize these warning signs when they see one.
Any dog can turn defensive (with terrible consequences) but most do not go into feral “destroy everything I can reach, even if I am being pounded with a baseball bat” mode at all. Reports of such complete “fuse blowing” seem to tilt entirely towards the pit-bred breeds. I can’t bring to mind such an incident to mind involving another breed. Biting, yes. Attack, yes. Outright mauling, often of multiple victims, no.
There seem to be a fair number of people who want to own a dog as a thing, like a TV or a dirt bike. I have a neighbor who sometimes has had a dog chained in her back yard – for security, I guess, but the dog gets little interaction with the people and ends up barking at me, at other dogs, at butterflies I guess, so the security idea becomes worthless. If you have an animal, it should become part of the family, IMO, otherwise, you should not have animal (except, I suppose, if you have animals for eating).
BTW, Merthiolate is rather uncommon these days. Everyone seems to prefer Neosporin, because using antibiotics at the drop of a hat is a good thing that could never have any downside. But, really, a dog bite tends to be the least likely way to get an infection, as I understand it.
I am not sure that was the correct spelling or ?? As a kid, Mom had 2 little bottles of red stuff for scrapes, etc. So I am trying to remember 1954 stuff. Anyway, one had or sounded like Mecurchrome which was not fun but when she got the Mathyolaid or that is kind of what the word sounded like, to use on us, WOW. Instant screams & death throws… So bad, so bad, even big tough teens cried like babies… Mom had an old bottle for years & years after it could not be found by her to use as a threat. It was a most powerful threat. IMO, that is what should be used on the wounds of people who mistreat animals. Just my opinion.
Did these people mistreat this dog? Who knows for sure but saying that a normal dog that thinks it is fighting for it’s life will not go all in like the pit type breeds has not been around good dogs ruined by the saintly humans.
News says mauled, dog has to be bad, no human accountability after the media tells us what happened… Bawahahahaha
Oh, I love dogs too, but I would hurt the shit out of one that was attacking a family member. Just didn’t know if stabbing it in the head was effective. I really don’t know what I’d do in this situation. I don’t put dogs in sweaters in the first place, so I may have well avoided this whole kerfuffle.
And the result is nevertheless that behavior variations from dog to dog are much bigger than variations on average between breeds, and again, a custom of calling mixed breed dogs of a certain general appearance ‘pit bulls’ does not make all those dogs of the same breed, which they simply are not.
Nor do the character traits purposefully bred into any generally recognized breed specifically include being aggressive toward humans, definitely not the recognized ‘bully breeds’. And where again can’t be repeated too often, the great majority of dogs called ‘pit bulls’ are not purebreds of any of those breeds, a fact dead center relevant to claims that ‘it’s in the DNA’, not some side note.
The AVMA’s recent metastudy of peer reviewed studies summarized the simple facts underneath the ‘pit bull’ hysteria:
“… controlled studies have not identified this breed group as disproportionately dangerous. The pit bull type is particularly ambiguous as a “breed” encompassing a range of pedigree breeds, informal types and appearances that cannot be reliably identified. Visual determination of dog breed is known to not always be reliable. And witnesses may be predisposed to assume that a vicious dog is of this type.” https://www.avma.org/KB/Resources/LiteratureReviews/Pages/The-Role-of-Breed-in-Dog-Bite-Risk-and-Prevention.aspx
so what? As with so many things in life the problems we see are not from the average but from the extremes. I accept fully that variations in the expression of characteristics will be present in all dog breeds. However, in some breeds of dogs the variation we see will be starting from a different average and the degree of variation will different even where the means are similar.
Women , on average , may well be cleverer than men, but certainly the variation within both genders dwarfs the difference between genders. However, men are represented more at the extremes of the distribution for intelligence.
If temperament is a selectable, inheritable trait in dogs then surely aggression is one part of that.
The example you give about women and men would lead to a totally different tangent, and is far from accepted as a fact, so not sure that adds anything and better just to leave it.
The last statement though devolves to a totally non-quantified boundary condition. Could inheritable behavior traits which correspond to the concept of breed have any significance? Yes. Practically speaking, given the much greater variation among individual dogs than among breeds on average, given the fact that dogs called ‘pit bulls’ are a wide variety of mixed breeds (properly speaking), given the absence of any attempt to produce dogs aggressive to humans in any of established ‘bully breeds’, is there any validity in predicting dogs are more likely to be aggressive to humans, controlled for their circumstances (treatment, training, over 80% of serious dog bites or death involve unfixed male dogs etc) because a layman calls them a ‘pit bull’ based on their general appearance? No. It’s constantly repeated as if a fact, and amateur pseudo-science has been attempted in order to ‘prove’ it by those who already believe it, but there’s no actual scientific evidence of it.