You don’t get sent to the bottom of the page, where it says
Pedro Rios
4-years old | Pasadenao, TX?
Exactly! Your link says at least one dog was mis-identified but dogsbite says they were both pit bulls. This is a perfect example of the problem with statistics that NajaNivea has been saying.
Thanks, but – no longer.
I took great pains and considerable length to lay out reasoned points of discussion, as well as offering my wholehearted agreement that breed bans are foolish and ineffective palliatives which do nothing to safeguard people from dog attacks. My disagreements focused on the differences between representative versus comprehensive sampling, “scientific” studies, and the nature of policy statements from national organizations. Nevertheless, throughout a veritable blizzard of post after post after post after post, in two different threads, NajaNivea is unable to discern my areas of agreement nor reply in kind to my reasoned discussion.
I’m tired of having what I actually said be so ridiculously misrepresented as this:
And this in a thread where I wasn’t even participating! Somehow, she just can’t seem to let it go. (No, no—I’m not gonna make the comparison. It’s unfair, and possibly patronizing. I’m not gonna, I’m not, I’m not!!!)
I should have known that it is impossible to have a reasoned discussion with a zealot. “True Believers” (™) aren’t interested in reasonable discussion, or in facts, but only in affirmation. Even if the affiants must be themselves. I’m done with this foolishness.
Yup, and therein lies much of our dog bite problem–most people don’t know how to “speak” dog, even a lot of people who have always kept dogs don’t really pay all that much attention to them, except as sort of living yard accessories or (on the opposite extreme) as extra-charming, rather hirsute children. Neither approach really does much justice to the canid in the picture, and sometimes they just don’t have any better “words” at their disposal than using their teeth for emphasis (punctuation?).
Most dogs that bite aren’t bad dogs, they’ve just been put in a situation that they don’t know how to control any other way. This is nearly always the fault of some person who didn’t socialize the dog to know what’s truly a threat and what’s not, didn’t train it to know its role in interaction with all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, or simply wasn’t on hand to tell the dog (or the kid) how to conduct himself in a novel or stressful situation. That’s how most dog bites, something like 70% committed by a family dog’s, happen.
The pit bull hysterics will dismiss all of this and tell you that pit bulls attack more often than any other breed (because they’re so volatile and aggressive), and also that when they attack, they inevitably rend their victims limb from limb, never stopping until their victim lies in bloody carnage before them. I have a hard time understanding how this can possibly be so, with 4.7 million dog bites happening every year, and only 16 or so ending in a fatality, less than half of those being committed by allegedly “pit bull type” dogs. That makes 0.0001% (give or take). The CDC finds no useful correlation to be drawn, because without knowing how many more pits there are than chows (or huskies or springer spaniels) in the country (Twice as many? Three times? Five? Ten? Fifty times as many?), and without knowing the actual breeding history of the dog involved, we have no way to evaluate whether three times as many “severe” bite incidents involving dogs identified as pits than chows (or huskies or springer spaniels) means anything or not.
Plus, the apparent “rise” in pit bull bite stats seems to mirror exactly the rise and fall of every other breed that has fallen in and out of fashion amongst the “bad guy seeking bad ass dog, must lack training, socialization, and endure lengthy stays in isolation on a chain” set. German Shepherd Dogs, Dobies, Rotties, Pits, next I predict Presas and Cane Corsos to fall in the unfortunate spotlight. The same people who are in here frothing now may eventually discard the pit bull prejudice, but let’s just say I won’t exactly be surprised if them or someone like them comes around in five years or so to tell us how Presas are like “no other dog that’s ever existed”.
</rant>
I have a mixed reaction to this post. First, you’re both partly right. Any small game killing dog is apt to grab and shake, but this doesn’t just include terriers. All kinds of hounds and curs, coursers, etc do so. Even wolves, deer hounds and so on do their work with a grip and shake–only their goal is a bunch of gaping (bleeding, tendon-cutting) slashes, which necessitates a shallower bite. Herding dogs have an even shallower version of this bite for bossing livestock around. Also, guardian type breeds have frequently to be taught a steady, deep-mouth bite. For many their inclination is to shake and tear–sheep and cattle drovers make the best protection dogs–but a GSD who does this rips chunks out of his victim and loses his grip on the bad guy. These though are all broad generalizations–like any successful and adaptable critter near the top of the food chain, they do what works to achieve their momentary goal. A hound killing something too big to lift might try giving a shake or two then hang on for the long haul if that’s what’s needed. That doesn’t mean that when schooling an obnoxious eight-year-old they’re inevitably going to shake or grip the kid to death, any more than a GSD will inevitably slash a kid’s throat open.
Anyway, all this theoretical talk is kind of a moot point when it comes to talking about little kids. A lab or springer might certainly be soft-mouthed by breeding and inclination, but whether fearful or aggressive or just inappropriately playful, a snapping 40-60lb dog of any breed can still do plenty of blunt-force trauma to an infant’s brain. Many of the victims in the CDC’s fatality reports are sleeping infants.
I think what he’s trying to say is that this website is a glorious example of media-fostered pit bull hysteria. They gleefully report the “pit bull carnage” story without the pesky “misidentification” details.
And yes, I do understand what Canny Dan is saying–he has gone to great lengths to present the same argument I am for reasoned broad-spectrum focus on a complex issue, with acknowledgment that some breeds and types of dogs are more “troublesome” than others. I admit that I’m picking at the guy now, because between the two of them, Canny Dan and his long-suffering pal LHOD, they piss me right the fuck off. gonzomax I sort of excuse because he just sounds like an idiot.
Canny Dan spends a half-dozen posts making the same argument I am and acting like I’m a lunatic for not having thought of it first, despite that I’ve been arguing the same stance on these boards for years now. He assures us over and over that he has nothing special against pits, and certainly doesn’t believe in BSL for a range of excellent reasons… yet he also assures us that the CDC and all these other professional groups are just BS’ing when they don’t cite the Clifton report, that I’m a “True Believer” and a “zealot” for not accepting as gospel a piece of tabloid nonsense with gaping holes in methodology you could drive a truckload of pit bulls through. I also tried to show him that I knew where we agreed–I linked him to posts I’d made in the past which demonstrated similar views and agreed with the points he was making now. Despite this he continued to try to set the whole thing up as some sort of bizarre straw man. I even asked him why he was doing it, and he continued to “argue” against himself with a “look how reasonable I’m being” air. WTF? And the Clifton report!
He insists over and over and over that this piece of garbage says something astounding about pit bulls, that I’m a blind zealot not to accept it as some kind of helpful information… despite the fact that the CDC does not cite it as reliable, and the AVMA states on the first page of their Dangerous Dogs paper that such a “report” is in no way reliable. He then tries to paint a picture of me as a drooling moron because I won’t say “oh, yeah, sure, maybe you are right that there’s ‘something different’ about a pit bull”.
I probably do sound like a bit of a lunatic at this point, but Og on a toothpick they piss me off.
(err, sorry for that misplaced 's up there, I’m all riled up.)
Three hours ago. 
Also of note is that if you click the “Pedro Rios” link there, you get taken to a YouTube clip posted by someone called “zupf”. Whose sole existance on YouTube is apparently to post reports of pit bull attacks. Out of all this person’s videos, it seems only the one for Pedro Rios has comments disabled.
That is… fabulous. That… err… website is run by Kory Nelson, who is the main driving force behind Denver’s pit bull ban, and a web designer pal in partnership with the shyster dog bite attorney LHOD keeps waving around and defending as “expert testimony” (and of course calling crazy zealots anyone who opposes his use of such citation).
(Sorry–missed your last post to curlcoat!)
Just poked through the Clifton report and it put the last nail in the coffin of my pit-bull misconceptions. Its flaws are /glaring/.
I see a lot of similarities between the anti-pitbull arguments and the anti-“assault weapons” crowd. While the intentions behind each are well-meaning (a desire to prevent needless violent death) the “enemy” in both arguments is a boogeyman created from horrible, practically inexcusable misconceptions of the subject matter.
Yes, I see that. What I don’t get is how that case is any different than Richard Adams 47-years old | Phenix City, AL or Allen L. Young 22-months old | Bamberg, SC or any of the other stories on that page about “pit bull” attacks.
Um, yes…?
…No, they pick fights with massively inferior opponents, the ones they can most easily kill with their prime weaponry. Do you think a cougar goes out looking for equally-matched opponents, so that he might give them the most equitable odds? All predators hunting take along their best game. It’s no more my desire to give the pig his best chance to kill me than it is the pig’s desire to give jlzania’s chickens a chance to kill him.
It appears that you, like many vegans, see yourself as separate and distinct from the food chain, never taking responsibility for the lives that inevitably go to feed yours. If a hog hunter or a farmer kills a lot of hogs in defense of his livelihood and your future plate of tempeh, the blood isn’t on your hands.
Cheers 
I was wrong; here’s another “zupf” video with comments disabled. The victim in this case was a known meth user with a history of seizures, which doesbite does mention.
You don’t get how not mentioning that the dogs that attacked Pedro Rios have been reported as misidentified and maintaining them as pit bulls is different from attacks by dogs which have not been reported as misidentified?
Well, the animals are doing it to survive. Ultimately, we mostly only kill animals for fun.
Our intelligence and inventiveness makes us distinct. I’d love it if there was a way to live my life ensuring that I never indirectly harmed an animal but unfortunately, short of becoming a hermit or killing myself, I know that no such way exists. I’m a vegan because I try to minimise that harm as much as possible.
I’d guess that a whole lot more animals are killed for food than are killed for sport. And killing them for food isn’t killing them for fun.
Which may explain your first comment.
Well, the majority of people (I’d go so far as to say the vast majority) don’t need to eat meat to stay healthy so if killing for meat isn’t necessarily fun, it’s certainly an optional activity for most folks. But still, I shouldn’t have said what I did because I honestly don’t have a beef with meat eaters. Pretty much everyone I know eats meat, and I was a meat eater for the first 20 odd years of my life so I don’t want to preach.
In the GD thread, out of 286 posts, NajaNivea contributed 108. Left Hand of Dorkness and I each contributed nine. In this thread, her count is 30 out of 154.
And all of that merely to agree with me, stating
I’m pleased to know that, although I mightily piss her off, at least she agrees with me. I shudder to think (somebody quick, cover the hamsters’ ears— won’t somebody think of the hamsters?!!?) what the post count would be if she actively disagreed!
That is not true–and in any case, where it is true of trophy hunting (or the rare sort of asshole that just goes shooting stuff for no particular reason and letting the corpses rot in the field), it has no bearing on a discussion of feral hog control. Even in that case there are exceptions, the people who shoot them for fun and let their corpses rot are doing some good for the environment and for our nation’s agriculture industry.
It makes us distinct because it gives us the appearance of alternative means, and therefore at least a healthy portion of the population can forget that someone, somewhere is doing some killing on your behalf. Your soybeans and lettuce kill plenty of animals (both directly in defense of the crops and indirectly through loss of habitat), they just don’t wind up on your plate. It may be less direct, but a vegan diet is definitely not “cruelty free”. You’re just paying someone else to do your share of the killing.
I don’t much like factory farming and intensive animal agriculture, so I suspect our views on that won’t be far off, but either way my personal opinion is that “ethics” can only come in to play when we’re talking about killing outside the food chain… which hog hunting with or without dogs absolutely does not, for me, for the farmer, or for you.
It is possible to live a self-sustaining vegan life style, raising your own crops and accepting huge losses to nature, but I’d contend that anyone eating a commercial vegan diet is likely to be culpable in a lot more deaths than they realize. Do I condemn you for the choice or think that eating a standard meat-heavy diet is better? No, but I will have words with any vegan who opposes human involvement in the death of any animal, for any reason, as a moral consideration… or who believes we humans are capable of removing ourselves from the food chain by “going veg”.
Yup, I’m just a crazy ol’ loony-tune, and every one of my posts was aimed directly at you.
Maybe you noticed, or maybe you didn’t… but my very first response to you was in agreement. You’re the one who kept setting up and knocking down your straw men and waving around your bullshit tabloid citation… then calling me a zealot for responding, most of which were posts to say I agreed with you on every point but Clifton. Call me crazy all you like, but it doesn’t change the facts, big guy, and it doesn’t hurt my feelings any. mangeorge tried the same thing back in the ATMB debate, and you’re just as oblivious an idiot as he is, only slightly less excusable because we apparently agree on every point but* the tabloid editor and what conclusions you draw from his bullshit report*. Calling me over-zealous for repeatedly refuting a straw man you repeatedly set up doesn’t make you look any more reasonable or objective than me.
I did not say that. YOU said that. I QUOTED you. This is like so much else-- drawn from your own fevered imagination and totally misconstrued.
And did I ever need refutation! That explains your post count in the GD thread of 138 to my nine. Yep, 15 replies to each one of my posts is objectively justified refutation of points you say you agree with, sure, and makes you look totally reasonable. Concise, even.
Just for point of information, what is this ATMB thread you keep bringing up?