So because it’s plausible that some breeds might be more inclined to bite people than others, we should ban Pit bulls?
Even though it’s plausible that they’re bred to get rid of this tendency?
I don’t like guns. I find them scary, and I find a lot of the people who want to own guns scary. Scary and suspicious – I think most of them are maybe up to no good. Oh sure, my brother and my brother-in-law and some of my friends like to hunt. But it’s not like they NEED to hunt. They won’t STARVE if they don’t hunt. And I’ve known a couple people who had dangerous job responsibilities and got permits to carry concealed. But they could have gotten DIFFERENT jobs instead. And anyway, the people I know are generally pretty good sorts and can probably be trusted with guns, but all those OTHER people out there – I don’t want any of them to be allowed to wander around with deadly weapons in my vicinity. And just the fact that some dangerous people get hold of guns is sufficient to convince me that nobody should be allowed to have a gun. The public has a right to be protected.
Some of the above is exaggerated a bit, but for the most part it’s true. I don’t like guns, and I’m sorry to say I do harbor some prejudices about gun owners. If I ran the world, it wouldn’t have guns in it, because I really do find them scary. But me finding them scary is not actually sufficient reason to ban them. I don’t really think the world should order itself to spare me from my (mostly irrational) fears.
And because that’s the case, I actually try to learn things from people who like and are knowledgeable about guns. I ask them questions, like, “How can we make guns safer?” Or “Why are you opposed to this gun control legislation?” Or even, “Why do you like guns?” I try to understand their points of view. I acknowledge that they know more about guns than I do. I try to learn things that will make me safer in a world that is going to continue to contain guns and gun owners. And, ultimately, I accept the fact that other people’s right to responsibly own the property of their choice trumps my right to feel 100% safe from any potential danger.
Dogs are potentially dangerous. But they’re also part of our world. It’s unlikely that any law will effectively change either of those two facts. So instead of insisting on the government providing you with a false sense of protection from the scary monsters and their even scarier owners, why not try to make a little bit of peace with the fact that there’s scary stuff in the world?
Guns aren’t dogs and dogs aren’t guns. But I really do wish that proponents of breed bans would take the trouble to learn a little bit about dogs and dog breeds from knowledgeable dog people, instead of arguing from their (mostly irrational) fears and their hair-raising “won’t someone think of the children” anecdotes. Then they call their own ignorance rationality and accuse their opponents of willful blindness and perversely sentimental attachment to the big bad doggies. It’s tiresome.
So clairobscur, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m sure you’re about as tired of the arguments of the opponents of breed bans as I am tired of the arguments of their supporters.
If it were clearly determined that some breed or group of breeds were committing a disproportionate number of serious maulings, and if we could reliably identify which dogs belonged to this group, it would make sense to consider restricting or banning them.
@Aholibah : FWIW, guns are mostly banned in France, and those that aren’t outright forbidden are heavily restricted and require registration, special permits, ability and morality tests etc… Only single action hunting rifles are allowed without running through a lot of hoops, and that’s only because of the political weight of the hunting lobby - if it were up to me, they’d go too.
The green ones or the red ones?
I find the (personal opinion: irrational) fear of inanimate objects fascinating.
Would you be offended if I struck up a conversation via Private Messages Aholibah, and pestered you with a few questions about it? I’d really enjoy getting some insight about it. You seem rather rational in general, and I get the feeling I could learn from you.
If it could be proven that the dog was inherently more aggressive, and it wasn’t a function of its upbringing.
For instance, it’s a pretty well accepted fact that the majority of thug like criminal activity takes place with the assailant wearing at least one article of black clothing, does that mean that we should ban black clothing in order to minimize criminal activity?
Endlessly fascinating… truly.
If France is anything like the US; you’d sacrifice the local ecology for a false sense of security… absolutely fascinating.
Local ecology ? What in Og’s name are you talking about ?
In much of the USA, if hunting were banned the local ecology would greatly suffer.
For instance; Deer. In the State of Ohio, if hunting were to be banned, the wild population of deer would explode (due to their natural predators being pushed out of the ecosystem long ago), and the deer would suffer malnutrition, leading many to suffer agonizing deaths from starvation. Not to mention the wholesale stripping of local plants, which would take years, if not decades for the area to recover from.
Ah. Well, you have to remember that France is very small compared to the US, is much more densely populated and extensively farmed, and has been for a much longer time. Deer are not really a problem here, they were so overhunted in the past that they had to be reintroduced in many forests. Same for bear or wolves : the last French bear was shot and killed in 2004, and wolves had totally disappeared way before that until some crossed over from Spain a decade ago (total pop. is estimated in the double digits, most of them in zoos & parks)
Not that it really would matter if they did : we have wildlife marshals whose job it is to control animal populations on top of looking out for poachers. Since they’re either military or police (not 100% sure which - most probably military), they may carry any weapon they like and have training requirements to make sure they do so safely.
In this country, there’s no ecological need for hunting that I know of nor that the hunting lobby has put forward (you can be damn sure they’d jump on such an argument in their neverending battle against the Greens 
), in fact many hunters hunt in parks where animals are bred specifically for hunting purposes. Which is very sick if you ask me.
However, there are about 200 hunting accidents per year, causing ~35 fatalities and three times that in serious injuries (cite). Compare to deaths by pitbull : less than 50 over 20 years. Hunters are more dangerous than pits ;).
I wasn’t talking about the entire country of the United States. I was talking about the State of Ohio, which is roughly 2/3 the size and 1/6 the population of the State of France.
Nope – go for it!
Very well.
I drive a small sports coupe. I am scared of all those big SUVs out on the road. They’re demonstrably more dangerous to other people in a crash. And I think a lot of the people who own them know that and want to scare responsible drivers like me, who choose small cars with good gas mileage, rather than big intimidating vehicles.
But I still don’t think the answer to my problem is for the government to ban SUVs. Even if I wish it would. The answer is for me to be responsible, understand the risks posed by my own choices and the choices of other people, and not impose my will on their freedom to own the property of their choice.
Don’t tell me. In France, everyone drives little cars and big cars are banned by government fiat. I should really move to France. I’d never be scared again.
I randomly picked this post to respond to and I’m not going to respond again to everybody, because honestly I don’t care enough about the issue to keep repeating myself.
Replace “majority” by “significant number” if you like. I wasn’t making a statement, and didn’t thought deeply about it when I wrote “majority”.
However, I’m going to tell that I don’t think I’ve seen a pitbull-type dog that didn’t belong to the “dog paraded by a wannabe badass” category.
So? 69% for the pit bulls alone, and 31% for all other dogs combined? Yes, that’s certainly good enough for me to think that pit bulls are way more dangerous than other dogs and justify a ban.
It would be a point in their favour if somehow you were assuming that in other breeds dogs who can’t be trusted would be allowed to bred. And this doesn’t make sense because all dogs are living around humans, and no owner or handler wants to be bitten by his own dog.
And yes, I’ll keep considering that a dog breed that has specifically bred to fight is likely to have undesirable traits, like aggressiveness, high pain threshold, ability to inflict severe damages, etc… What traits, according to you, would have been selected for fighting dogs? Gentleness, shyness, reluctance to fight and soft bite?
Any position pushed to the extreme leads to absurd results. Don’t try to catch me with that because it would equally apply to almost any point you could make. For instance, if you’re stating that people speeding on the road should be fined because they’re dangerous, I could make the case that your position “logically requires” banning all cars.
See…As I said already, the right for people to own a specific breed of dog is an extremely low priority for me. If public authorities decided to ban a breed, I’m going to assume they have a good reason for this (including reasons like police officers having regularly problems with such dogs and their owners because said dogs became a fad amongst unsavoury types and are used as tools in crimes. Doesn’t need to be a large number of unprovoked, random attacks), and not just because somehow, they don’t like dogs. I probably won’t care enough to second guess them.
If, besides that, I notice that in my neighbourhood, such “badass parade dogs” are all over the place, unmuzzled, if I learn that these dogs were a fight breed, hence probably have undesirable traits, if I read statistics that hint at them being responsible for a large percentage of serious attacks, I’m going to support heartily restrictions put on them until you prove, to a very high degree of certainty, that they aren’t, in fact, any more dangerous than a poodle. Basically, contrarily to a human, I assume the breed to be guilty until proven innocent. And the informations I mentioned above hint towards them being probably guilty, or at the very least, possibly so.
Well actually… 
Just kidding, we don’t go that far in the “better safe than sorry” mentality. Yet.
Boars at least are a problem. Their population has to be kept in check. And I’m not so sure about deer, either (I might be wrong and it might depends on the region, though).
Wolves have crossed over from Italy (coming originally from the Balkans), not from Spain. And rather 25 years ago. Finally, the double digits probably refers to wild wolves outside natural parks, because there are much more than that in parks and zoos (After googling : more than 100 wolves live in the Gevaudan natural park alone).
They belong neither to the military nor to the police (even though they have some law enforcement powers, obviously). They are employed by the agency in charge of hunting regulation (Office National de la Chasse).
They do mention this argument quite often, actually.
And saying they hunt in parks where animals are bred specifically for hunting is misleading. Owners of large properties in areas where hunting is traditionally a leisure activity for wealthy people and a source of income (like Sologne) might make sure they have a stable population of animals in order to sell hunting rights. That’s population regulation rather than breeding. I understand that it’s quite similar to the situation in the UK, for instance.
In other areas where hunting is a popular activity amongst the rural population and where traditionally there’s no such thing as hunting rights (until some years ago, even the law differed depending on the region : for instance in many areas, you couldn’t ban hunting on your own land) and where people customarily hunt everywhere, there’s something else that happen that you might consider an abuse : bred small game (birds) are often released soon before the hunting season.
No doubt. And you’re allowed to call me a hypocrite, because I don’t oppose hunting.
Contrarily to other dog breeds that are bred to attack humans, presumably?
Which means that the population density is only 1/4 that of France, hence that Ohio has presumably much more extended wild areas (except if extensive farming covers much of the land, for instance).
** Kobal2 ** is right (well, to some extent at least, since I disagree with some of his statements) : regarding hunting, you can’t really compare the situation in North-America and in way more densely populated Europe. Even though France happens to have a low density by European standards, and would probably be the less different, you still can’t extend your experience of the situation in the USA to a country like France.
Didn’t they recently put special taxes on big cars? That could somehow fit the bill.
Besides, SUVs aren’t exactly common to begin with, anyway.
No, contrary to other breeds that are neither bred to attack or not attack.