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Given that pit bulls are impossible to identify absent pedigrees, no statistics exist to prove them dangerous, either.
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This is just amazing, not to mention untrue: “impossible to identify”?!!! So I guess if I spent a week with you driving around LA and gave you $1,000 for every dog you could correctly identify (then actually check through papers and/or DNA) you’d wind up with $0. Okay. You’re confusing a formal designation from an authorizing body with reality.
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So now we are talking about how dangerous pits are who are trained to be vicious? What the fuck does that do with the topic at hand?
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I was giving you the benefit of the doubt and looking at the worst case scenario owner-wise. The point stands. You’re free to search for another reason to ignore it.
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I thought this was about dogs killing children, not dogfighting. I have absolutely no thoughts on how successful goldens would be against pit bulls or any other similar breed. Is that the sound of goalposts moving I hear?
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No. It must be the sound of reality scratching at the lead-reinforced steel blinders you use. Let’s see, in a discussion examing the visciousness—or non-visciousness—of pit bulls I bring up an arena in which that visciousness is dialed to maximum. What was I thinking? :rolleyes:
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You are equivocating here with your use of the phrase “bad owners.” I have defined responsible ownership for you. Anyone who fails one of the categories could be a bad owner. What do *you *mean when you say bad owner? You are also begging the question by assuming that pit bulls are “inclined to rip someone’s throat out.” You cannot prove that pit bulls are so inclined by asserting it. Logic 101.
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Debate 101: You cannot state that someone asserted something they did not assert. It is unhelpful to the discussion, not to mention dishonest, although I don’t think you did it intentionally.
Logic 101, Chapter 2: Given A and B, stating that A is not C does not mean that B is C.
By bad owner I mean someone who abuses a dog or tries to draw out as much of the dogs visciousness as possible, whether directed to other dogs or humans.
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No dogs are “inclined to rip someone’s throat out.”
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I agree, but it is easier to for some dogs to do it than others. Or encouraged to do it. Physicality plays a large role, as does temperment of the breed. Tell me, do you think that breeds have the same baseline temperments? That a golden, other than the physical attributes, is identical to a pit bull, or that the temperment of a border collie is identical to a bull mastiff? If so, I think most dog books and authorities would disagree with that. I don’t think anyone would disagree that much of this hardwiring can be written over, so to speak, but that does not mean it is not there.
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Specifically pit bulls, who, for the third time, are bred to be non-aggressive to humans.
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Kind of an overly sweeping statement, don’t you think? Then there’s all those headlines.
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I could take that Golden and raise him in such a way as to be lethally dangerous to humans.
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Possibly. But you can not train him to be as much of a killing machiine as a pitbull similarly trained.
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Then why your prejudice against the breed?
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I am prejudiced toward reality. The one that is expressed in the title of this thread. And my “bias” is not reserved for pitbulls alone. As I’ve stated. I think any dog that has shown itself to account for the number and severity of attacks that pitbulls have should be treated the same. I don’t particularly care the degree to which it is the fault of the breed or the fault of the owner—that’s almost impossible to determine—I offered a practical solution that ignores that unknowable. For whatever reason the combination of pitbulls and there owners have focused a spotlight on pitbulls. Let’s deal with that reality.
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More mayhem than what? Dogs who are less physicall imposing? So what? They are not as capable of mayhem as dogs who are more physically imposing. BFD. Their capacity for mayhem is a function of physicality, not temperament.
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It’s a combination of the two. There are, I gather, dogs that can be even more devasting. In San Francisco a few years ago two Presa Canarios/Mastiff hybrids killed a young woman in her hallway. If they are worse than pit bulls I don’t know. They appear to be, as they are one-and-a-half to twice the size. From what I remember reading about them—a mix of English Mastiff and some Canary Island breed—they are bred to be supreme fighting dogs. A mastiff is one of, if not THE, most muscular, powerful dogs there is. Yet, when someone is looking for a fighting dog, they look to add somnething to the Mastiff, while sacrificing size. What is that something else?
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Again witht the circular logic. Their baseline personality trait is “dog.”
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It doesn’t stop there. Again, not all breeds have the same baseline personality traits. If we disagree on this we should both just call it a day.
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nI also remind you that pit bulls are the dog of choice among knuckleheads who own them in order to project an air of toughness. They like it when their dogs are aggressive, and encourage the dogs to behave that way.
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But why do so many of these knuckleheads choose pitbulls? It’s because that after applying there idea of traiing they wind up with more of an intimidating killing machine than most other breeds.
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Well, the dog in question killed a child in the home. From the stastics cited in this thread, how many of the dogs ID’d as pit bulls actuall were pit bulls? How many of them were procured as family pets? What’s that? There is no way to tell? Exactly.
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Precisely. But it seems that you are assuming that the behavior that is the point of this thread is the result of trainiing only. Where is the evidence of that? Right? It’s not there. So we agree that it is an unknown. So what are we left with? Headlines. “Again and Again and Again”. On the other side we have people who trot out the oh-so-helpful prescient insight “It’s not the dog, it’s the owner.”
Let’s try this again. You assert that “I’ts not the dog, it’s the owner”. I’ve asserted “It is the dog AND the owner”. You can still win that $10,000. Seventy-pound golden of your choice against the average 60-pound pit bull. This offer goes to dispell your claim that the breed of the dog has nothing to do with it’s abilty to inflict lethal damage, so no need to go trotting out your “we’re looking at dogs attacking people, not other dogs”.