Have you actually read my posts in this thread?
Hint: Look up about 20 posts
Oops, sorry. Can’t respond because I’m on my way out the door for vacation. I’ll have to read that again to see what it says.
From my experiences with aggressive dogs in rural areas, #2 strikes me as the factor most worth looking at. My experience with dogs has been pretty large–I’ve lived with a cocker spaniel (sweet, dumb as a box of hammers), an aussie shepherd (poorly trained and kept in a crate 23 hrs a day by my roommate’s idiot fiancee–he eventually DID send the dog to live on a farm, very prey aggressive and tried to herd humans) and a black lab/mastiff cross( (abused, most dangerous dog I’ve personally worked with, finally trained human-aggressiveness out of it but never got her to be not dog aggressive, owner wouldn’t put her down), and had long-term experience with rottweilers (poorly trained, aggressive, dangerous, owned by rednecks), a standard poodle (poorly trained, aggressive, arguably as dangerous as the rotties, owned by well meaning lazy people), and a chihuahua (very sweet fatass dog) and pomeranian (dumb and sweetheart). I generalize from this that dog personality primarily is influenced by training (or lack thereof) and formative experiences, at least as far as I’ve seen in my life.
My wife at one point worked at a veterinary clinic and saw many dozens of dogs in her experience. Briefly, it was her contention that in the clinic the dogs most likely to attack unprovoked were smaller dogs and herding dogs, while the mastiffs, pit bulls, and rottweilers tended to be sweet and well-behaved. It is possibly worth noting that she worked in a very prestigious (and expensive!) office, and thus there was a LARGE degree of self-selection towards “people who could and would pay a lot of money for routine vet work”, which can favor the “responsible owner” argument.
Looking at that CDC graph, if there were numbers for the 2000s I’d expect to see the pit bull fatalities spike upwards again, and see also a few more entries for the newer “popular” big breeds in the same range as Dobermans and German Shepherds. More or less, I would prefer punishing the owners to punishing the dogs as a breed because all of my experience with dogs is that the owner/trainer has much more effect on a dog’s potential for aggressive misbehavior than the breed does–banning all pits might well just lead to a rash of rottweiler attacks.
On another note, I note the linked CDC report has many of the same concerns about their own data as some of the posters here.
Stupid hamsters. Continued below:
That all seems to echo Blake’s theme that dog identification is hard.
I disagree with your interpretation of the part you bolded, by the by.
That seems to be being said within the context of the fourth caveat–that regardless of the focus on purebreeds or crossbreeds, the statistics look similar in terms of rankings, BUT when crossbreeds are involved the curve is a LOT flatter even if the same types of dog are in the same general places. Also, that caveat doesn’t seem to mitigate (their phrasing is unclear) the other caveats.
As for what they would be misidentified as? I’ve personally seen people call anything from a dogo argentino to a bulldog to a boxer to a lab/mastiff cross a “pit bull type”. These are all very different dogs. There is a portion of the public who will call any dog with a square jaw over a certain size a pit bull–many of these people will misidentify pit bulls as something else because purebred pits aren’t always that big, and they don’t perceive a medium-small dog as a pit.
Zeriel, some good points worth debating. While I don’t doubt your wife has lots of experience with dogs, the plural of anecdotes is not ‘data’, which is why I am trying to keep an open mind WRT my dog experience.
As I noted above, the CDC report does note the inherent difficulties with breed ID-ing; I think there probably is something to that, and the CDC itself seems to be saying that actual numbers might be a bit different - my point, however, is that I don’t think that the mis-identification number would be significant enough to change the overall landscape of the data - pits and rotts account for the vast majority of dog bite fatalities.
I agree that ‘a portion of a general public’ might mistake any ‘square jaw’ dog as a pit. But we’re not talking about ‘the general public’ here. These aren’t random dog bites that show up second- or third-hand in police blotter reports: We’re talking about incidents where people have died. In those kinds of cases, the media reports are simply going to be more in-depth, and one would expect, more accurate: police will be involved, they’re going to find the dog, and they’re going to find the owner (particularly since, if I recall correctly, most of the time people were killed in homes where the dog lived). Note, for example, the example of four-year old John-Paul Masseywho was killed in Liverpool last year: interesting is that this story supports both our positions: The dog was originally ‘thought to be an American bull mastiff’ (i.e., breed ID-ing isn’t an exact science at least initially) was later confirmed from ‘forensic tests and a post mortem examination’ to be a pit bull (one, if people can mistake other breeds for pit bulls, sometimes pit bulls are mistaken for other breeds, so perhaps the mistakes even out, and two, identification accuracy would appear to improve in cases where people die).
Finally - I don’t think the curve really changes all that much based on how the dogs are counted. Check out the actual numbers in Tables 1 and 2 in the report: In table 1, pit-type and rotts account for about 44% of the total - in table 2, the figures are c. 42% for both ‘total’ columns.
Well thank you very much! 
You too have made excellent points, both in that previous thread and in this one.
I’ve been reading this current discussion, but had no intention of reiterating a position I presented extensively in that earlier train wreck. I’ve tired of beating my head against people who do not understand the differences between scientific studies, peer review, statistical analysis, and position papers.
You bring some novel insights to the discussion, but you are battling the same kinds of misunderstandings. Feel free to carry on the good work, with my thanks and applause. I’ll read along, for grins and giggles at least.
How can you say that and at the same time acknowledge that the ID’s are dodgy? Especially considering that the ID is the single most crucial piece of data?
And right on cue, an illustration of my point.
Good luck DragonAsh, you’ll need it!
Sheesh - indeed. Contrapuntal, have you at least read my posts in this thread?
I think the problem/disconnect here is that you’re making assumptions that my reading of the CDC report indicates are unfounded.
This seems directly contradicted by
Realistically, there’s no sure way to identify the breed of a non-papered dog–which is an argument against breed-specific bans primarily because the cost of purebred papered dogs mitigates the risk of the owners being neglectful or criminally irresponsible. By contrast, backyard-bred mutts not covered by breed-specific bans will continue to be out there.
The opposite holds true for feature-specific bans that attempt to define “pit bull” by a collection of features (square jaw, build, etc) rather than breed standards–that opens the door for people both well-meaning (people can be afraid of dogs in general) and malicious (neighbor dispute? say his boxer growled at you and it has “pit bull” features) to abuse the law for the purpose of attacking breeds that we can probably agree don’t share personality traits and risk with pits and rottweilers–hell, there are a scary number of people who will assume any brindle-colored dog is a rottweiler (and therefore dangerous), as Blake pointed out above.
Also, there’s the issue that the CDC itself disagrees with the conclusions you’re drawing from the report–it seems to me that if they were as confident in their data as you are, they’d be a bit less circumspect about suggesting courses of action. There’s not exactly a huge political outcry over breed-specific bans (at least, none that results in politicians who pass same becoming unelectable that I’ve seen) so why be so circumspect if they didn’t consider their own data suspect?
only 2 and 4 look like a Rottweiler to me, the rest are mixes or not at all.
damn i checked the spoiler, I was wrong. 5 looks like it’s mixed with a pyrenees to me, that wrinkly head is what screwed me up on that one, plus the tail.
Data point two. And once again people are completely incapable of identifying rottweilers.
And that pretty much answers the question aske above. People are misindentifying doberman X labrador crossbreeds as purebred rotties, and misidentifying pedigree English mastiffs as rotty crossbreeds.
I would really be interested in seeing someone try my second list. There are more pedigree dogs in there. I want to see if anybody does better than random chance in picking them. I’m betting they can not.
There’s no shame attached to doing badly in these tests. I’ve already admitted that I’ve believed a dog was rottwieler for months before finding out it was a mastiff x doberman hybrid.
As the CDC study says: even experts disagree on the identity of these dogs in controlled situations. There is no way in hell that a someone involved in an attack is going to be able to do better than random chance.
Yeah, I have. Where did you address the issue of misidentifying a particular breed being evidence of the behavior of a particular breed?
In the case of a fatality, it’s highly unlikely that the ‘person involved in the attack’ is going to be making the identification, because they’re dead.
As I’ve noted several times, we’re not talking about random, third-hand accounts of dog bites - these are incidents where people have died. Surprisingly, when people actually die, police and animal control authorities tend to get involved. Second, the majority of dog fatalities occur in the home where the dog actually lives. Third, the dog in quesiton is almost always put down after a fatal incident.
So - you have professional law enforcement and animal control people involved - I think you would agree that IDs made by authorities are going to be more accurate than not. We almost always have the owner - I think you’d agree that owners know what kind of dog they own. And we almost always have the actual dog. I think you would agree that actually having the dog increases accuracy.
For example, note this newspaper article from just today in Philadelphia. Or this story in Apple Valley, California. Or this story, from last December. I’ve previously linked the Liverpool case; here’s another case from back in 2007.
In every case above, the person was killed by a family pet, and the dog was either put down or was at the very least taken into custody by animal control authorities.
The CDC notes the difficulties involved, but I see nothing that says that ‘difficult’ always equals ‘always inaccurate’. As would be the case for any such study, you note the difficulties involved in getting the data, and you discuss the steps taken to control/correct for them.
The data might not be 100% accurate, but somehow assuming that the underlying data rankings are completely different seems to be a bit of a stretch at best. Even if we assumed that *half *of all pit/rott bite fatalities were incorrectly reported as such (i.e., were actually caused by another breed), pits and rotts would still be by far the most frequent breed involved in fatal attacks.
In my view, the biggest difficulty in determining breed-incidence in dog bite deaths isn’t the identification part, it’s being able to determine breed-specific populations - but over the 20-year period covering the study pits and rotts accounted for over 40% of all dog bite deaths, and I don’t think anyone would seriously claim that pits and rotts accounted for anywhere close to 40% of the dog population in the US during that time.
Further, even if we were to assume that people are mid-identifying pit-type dogs and rottweilers, what dogs are they being mis-identified as? No one is going to mis-identify a toy poodle or an Afghan hound for a pit-type dog or rottweiler. Nor would I expect any significant percentages of such mis-identification to involve a german shepard, husky-type, malamute, doberman, chow how, great dane, or st bernard - all which are on the list of the CDC report.
And, if you want to claim that people are going to mis-ID some breeds as pits/rotts, then I’d counter that we can equally assume that sometimes people will mis-ID pits/rotts as other breeds, so in some respects you’d expect the errors to balance out, so to speak.
First, note that they do make a fairly specific statement regarding breed-specific factors:
And I discussed why they might be hesitant to focus on specific breeds above, but actually, the report discusses it as well - in the very next paragraph (bolding mine):
In other words - the CDC isn’t concerned with helping the politicians passing breed-ban acts. It seems pretty clear to me that the CDC, while noting that breed-specific factors appear to be at work, there is a larger problem to tacke, breed ID-ing even in a perfect word is expensive, time-consuming, and impractical - and since dog bites overall are a much bigger problem (bites turning out fatal are quite rare; only 0.00001% of all dog bites, according to the report), the CDC’s stance is, local governments need to take a big-picture approach. I also think the CDC is specifically trying to avoid the appearence of giving any credence to breed-ban legislation, which everyone agrees is unworkable, perhaps not even legal, does little to actually reduce overall dog bites (especially if it just drives such breeds underground), and means that governments will not be considering other, more effective measures.
I don’t think this changes what the underlying data suggests, however. Either:
- Some breed-specific factors at work, or
- owners of these breeds are more likely to be irresponsible, or
- bite incidents involving these breeds are more likely to be fatal
I actually don’t agree with any of those, really. Law enforcement doesn’t care, and the average owner of a pit or rottie mix that bites is (anecdotally in my experience) a flaming hick who can barely distinguish car manufacturers, let alone what breed their big bad furry penis extension is.
I’m dead serious in that you don’t seem to have any idea how hard it is to reliably identify breed without knowing parentage and papers–you mix the right combo into a mutt and it could come out looking like a nonconforming example of ANY breed while having a totally different breed personality. Again, my wife worked for a vet hospital, and they requested owner identification of breed because they didn’t trust themselves to do it reliably, and arbitrary outliers were ALWAYS the bigger problem than any specific breed.
You seem to keep forgetting 4) people are far more likely to vilify breeds that are in the public consciousness as “dangerous”.
I would also add, back in the spirit of the OP which we’re drifting away from, 5) Since fatal incidents are a vanishingly small problem, why do we always end up focusing on that instead of total bite incidents?
I can’t argue with 2–there is a limited pool of “scary” dogs, and it seems like the assholes of the world rotate through poorly-bred examples of a fixed set of breeds–pits, rotties, dobermans, german shepherds.
I can’t argue with 3, but it doesn’t take a huge increase in “more likely” for less than 15 fatalities a year to show up.
My biggest issue is with #1–the most dangerous dogs at the vet never were members of “dangerous” breeds–and more to the point when discussing legislation, out of all the dogs this clinic saw in the course of my wife’s two years working there, only two of them had any human-aggression problems. One was a horribly abused springer spaniel who hated pretty much all living things except his rehabilitator, and the other was a Great Dane owned by a family who had no business with a large, powerful dog, and who was 100% sure the entire world belonged to him and would lunge at you if you so much as barely startled him.
Argh - I almost didn’t reply to this because my posts are getting longer and longer. I’ll end up with Unabomber-long posts if this keeps up. So let me try to keep this short. I can expand on this more if needed.
First, I can’t go along with this:
In other words, all pit/rottie owners are fine, upstanding citizens and are knowledgeable about their pets, *except *when the dog bites someone, in which case the owner is an ignorant lout? Really? That’s your argument?
That just doesn’t cut it. I would bet good money that after every fatal attack I noted in my last post, the owner said something along the lines of ‘the dog had never done anything like that, he was such a loving, family dog - it was so unlike him, I don’t know what set him off’. In fact, quotes just along those lines were in some of the articles.
So either the owners was irresponsible, and was just lucky for a long time at first, or the owner was responsible at first, but suddenly irresponsible? Either way, it doesn’t really breed (heh) much confidence does it?
I don’t really see how we could assume that the ‘proportion of irresponsible owners’ would be significantly out of whack for specific types of dogs. Show me data suggesting that pit/rott owners have lower levels of participation in training classes, for example. Given the lack of even a shred of such evidence, I think the reasonable assumption is there is a fairly typical and even distribution of irresponsible owners across all breeds.
As to why we focus on fatalities vs overall dogbites? That is an interesting question.
I think it has to do with scale: Local governments have thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people to think about. In other words, the millions of dog bites per year are a major problem. But for my family, my area of responsibility is much smaller. Dog bites are pretty common, but at the household level, it’s manageable. Heck, we probably all know someone that has been bitten - and most of the time we all live through 'em just fine (heck, I was bitten pretty good…er, badly, on the jaw when I was about eight or nine). But a fatality - now, that has a much bigger impact on my household than it does to the overall city of millions. Just like for major vs petty crimes, I think people *as individuals * end up focusing on the extreme outcomes.
Anyway, I may get a dog for the family understanding the bite risks, but I will definitely avoid putting my family at a greater risk of getting fatally bit. I could of course reduce that risk to zero by not getting a pet. I could also reduce the risk of my family being involved in a fatal car crash by never letting my family get in a car, but in both cases, the extreme method of addressing the risk isn’t that realistic or practical. I’ll get a dog that I think will be a good pet, while avoiding breeds that seem more disposed to killing little kids (variances among individual dogs notwithstanding).
Finally - regarding '4) people are far more likely to vilify breeds that are in the public consciousness as “dangerous”, I think the simplest answer is, that its because those breeds are more likely to be involved in dangerous accidents.
Nope, my argument is that the average guy who wants a mean tough dog (irresponsible by definition) is going to buy a pit or rottie.
Yes, and you will see that with regard to just about every kind of dog that bites anyone ever. Some dogs do just lose their shit. However, bigger dogs with a bad rep and a more “tough” appearance quality are MORE LIKELY to be owned by the kind of owner who will think aggressive behavior and biting are positive traits.
Or, of the pit bull population currently extant, a majority of their owners are the aforementioned bad dog owners.
Really. You can’t see any reason at all why the kind of irresponsible owner who sets out to have a tough motherfucker of a dog would disproportionately choose a backyard-bred pit bull or rottweiler? Seriously? That guy’s just as likely to buy a standard poodle since they’re about the same size?
I think you’re giving far too much credence to that. I’m not going to bother to do the research because the CDC report already says it’s not possible to get good data on this, but anecdotally I’ve seen people identify a freaking Yellow Lab as a “pit bull” when it was an abused rescue dog that snapped at their precious puppy.
Look, the ultimate question here (from the OP) is whether or not pit bulls deserve to be vilified as “worst dogs”–and I think that’s asinine. The number of fatalities is so low relative to the population of the country that it’s a non-issue. The typical well-trained pit bull is a great family dog with zero aggression problems. Yes, they’re a relatively powerful dog, which will skew bite damage up. Yes, there is a problem with irresponsible owners gravitating to pit bulls, which will skew number of bites up. Neither of these things are particularly a unique problem to pit bulls, but the combination pushes their bite fatalities (along with Rottweilers) slightly higher than other dogs in their size range. For a family dog, realistically, the chance that my personal child will be one of the 11 people in the US killed by a pit bull (in a particularly bad year) is a very acceptable risk compared to, say, the number of times the average Jack Russel or Cocker Spaniel nips hard with relatively little provocation. And I think if you’re assessing the fatality risk of a pit bull as anything other than “negligible” you’re buying into the hysteria–your swimming pool is statistically far more dangerous to your kids, as are their bikes and lightning storms.
Which is probably part of our disconnect–we’re arguing two separate things. I have no problem conceding that badly raised pits are marginally more dangerous than, say, badly raised cocker spaniels–I just don’t think that risk is or should be an issue for someone truly prepared to own a medium to medium-large sized dog.
I think “proper training” is a bit of a misnomer because it implies dogs that have traditionally higher prey or fighting instincts need specialized training. That’s not true. What is true is that they require an assertive owner that doesn’t let them get away with misbehavior. Ideally, every pet owner would do this, but people who own small dogs, for example, often let them get away with a lot because of how cute they were. Give the same owner a pit bull and you could have trouble on your hands.
So I don’t think pit bulls require “proper training,” just the kind of leadership and discipline that everyone should give their dog in the first place. Cesar Milan’s pack of pit bulls show they can be as calm and submissive as any other breed, no problem.