God you really are an obtuse work of wet slimy shit. You’re saying the same fucking thing. 3.2% to 4.7% is…47% growth. Over 10 years. Not one year, not 3 years, 10. Also, since I haven’t found any underlying data for each year, we don’t know if that was slow constant growth, whether the growth came in just the last 3 years, or what. I do suspect after the financial crisis owners may have moved to smaller dogs over the last 4-5 years instead of big dogs that eat a lot more (I say that because the major trend at least based on dogs being taken to Banfield hospitals is towards smaller dogs vs larger dogs).
In other words - you can crow about that ‘47% growth! OMG!’ all you want, it doesn’t change a fucking thing: Pits account for 4-5% of the dog population but the majority of kids being chewed to death. And pits have nothing on other breeds - like Chihuahuas (more than doubled! 116%! Or Shih Tzus (87%)! And yet, oddly, there’s been no rash of dog bite deaths from chihuahuas or Shih Tzus. I wonder why that is.
Almost the exact words many families say while burying their chewed-up kid. ‘Our dog never even growled at us, he was such a sweet dog’.
Please cite cases where the dog that chewed someone to death was correctly identified as a pit bull type dog and we have a conversation.
Just like Cougar you are ignoring everything in your zealotry, and I suppose that is your right. I gave you a couple simple links and like everything else that might have helped you see things a bit more clearly you ignored them.
fighting ignorance is noble, fighting a determined dumbass is pointless.
Oh dear me…clearly some of us take it rather badly when our errors are pointed out to us…not to mention losing all track of the discussion in our haste to stomp our feet and express ourselves. how unfortunate.
Stoid, I am really late to this Pit debate, but are you really debating the propensity of pitbulls to be abnormally agressive? Seriously?
You seem to know a lot about the breed, having owned a lot of them and all, but you (and others) seem to be in a state of denial about the reality of their reputation. They didn’t get it for being being lovey-dovey doggies you know. Nobody would be arguing otherwise if they were. The FACT is that pits (and their brothers and cousins) are responsible for more than their fair share of serious and fatal dog attacks the world over…
I know you love your dog, and that is great etc, but YOU are being obtuse to deny otherwise.
The fact that you are late to the debate is revealed by the many inaccuracies in your post, about virtually everything. Both this thread and the closed pitbulls thread will reveal all… I am not going to start over just for you.
It’s like you just made all that up. The people whose mutt bit me in the face and tore open my lip had no “prior indications that the dog [was] prone to viciousness.” When my dachshund jumped up and bit my friend Robyn in the face and ripped open her nose, we had no “prior indications that the dog [was] prone to viciousness.”
And as we’ve pointed out here numerous times, in the majority of pit bull attacks — 80 percent or better — the owners created the circumstances in which the attacks were able to happen.
When you add any four of the above together, you get a very different picture from how most people treat the average beagle or Labrador retriever. Beagle and Lab owners are more likely to have their dogs neutered, keep them inside the home as house pets, obedience train them, take them on regular walks, etc.
But when you read all the stories that are posted here about pit bull attacks you’ll find circumstances that fit this list. For instance, the story linked to above — Kernersville woman mauled to death by dogs — says this: “Another man that lives at the home found Atkins dead inside a dog enclosure.” She may have “known” these dogs since they were puppies, but they were not her dogs and they were not kept as family pets, they were kept outside in a dog enclosure. How many beagle owners do you know who lock their beagles in cages outside?
In a previous link provided here, a mother lost her two-year-old to her “pampered,” family pet pit bull … when she left said two-year-old alone with the dog on a different floor of the house where she was not only unable to even keep an eye on them, but unable to intervene. If that same negligent mother left her two-year-old alone on a lower floor near a bucket of water and the unattended child drowned, you would not be calling for the banning of water buckets. An average of 350 children under age five drown every year in the home in the U.S. In 2001, 18 children drowned in buckets. Multiply that out over the same nine-year period and you have potentially 162 dead children due to bucket drowning. Add bathtubs and the number explodes to 810. That’s more than three times the number of fatal dog attack deaths, but the dog attack deaths are more gory so they elicit a stronger emotion when you read about them happening. Yet 80-plus percent of them were as preventable as bathtub drownings, if people hadn’t been neglectful in some manner.
Why on earth not? Because it’s more horrifying when people are chewed up by dogs than when they drown? Is the parent any less responsible if their child is left unattended and killed by a dog than if left unattended and drowns, or if they’re unattended and hit by a car?
I doubt even that would work.
Assumptions not supported by fact. My two are rescue dogs and would have ended up in a shelter had we not intervened (we took them from neighbors who were about to give them up to a shelter), and not because they weren’t wonderful dogs, but because the former owners could no longer handle the responsibility of keeping these two large dogs, both of which have special medical needs that are outside of their ability to pay for, and taking care of a new baby as first-time parents.
Thank you. They are really adorable.
::dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun::
Honestly, if you met these two dogs — especially Dukie — you’d be in love with them in no time. They’d win you over just like they have everyone else who has met them. They’re just gigantic, affectionate goofballs.
I guess it just mean that golden retriever owners are just all-around more intelligent, since they apparently almost never create the situations that result in a dog chewing a kid to death.
I used to have Goldens. Now I have a rotty mix and a pit. I am a dog lover with all kinds of dogs. I treat my pit and my rotty mix with as much l9ve, education, and attention as I did my Goldens. (More, actually, for reasons unrelated to the issues we are discussing)
Most pit owners are like me.
But pits ALSO attract another kind of dog owner, the sort of dog owner who would only choose a pit, or a German Shepherd, or a Rottweiler… Because they want something more from the dog then the companionship and joy of the dog’s company. The dog is an accessory for them, another “thing” that helps them represent themselves to the world in a particularly unpleasant way. That is the small but significant subset of pit owners who are irresponsible and stupid and create situations where the pits hurt people and therefore get all the press, leading to the misunderstandings and assumptions people like you make. It’s most of what you ever hear about pit bulls and their owners so you make the leap that it must represent all or even most, but of course that’s silly. You don’t hear about most pit owners and their pit bulls for the same reason you don’t hear about most dog owners and their dogs: there’s nothing newsworthy about them. You only hear about the ones that cause trouble… It does not mean that all or most are actually causing trouble, and a moment’s thought should make that perfectly clear.
By the way, we saw a pit/mastiff mix today on our walk/picnic. HOLY FUCK those dogs are MONSTROUS. This thing had at least 100, if not 150 pounds on our dogs, and ours weigh 80+ pounds. It looked like a small HIPPO. I’m not even remotely exaggerating That thing is NOT a “pit bull”; It’s some other thing entirely.
First, define “pitbull.” Many people see “bull” in a dog’s breed name and tar it with the same brush as a meth dealer’s protection, though most bulldogs and bull terriers have been bred exclusively as companion dogs for a century and a half.
Second, how genetically dilute would you permit? Can a dog that is a mulatto be excused its accident of birth? A quadroon? An octoroon? Or would you insist on racial purity using the One Drop Rule and put down any dog with the slightest hint of pitbull blood?
Third, how the fuck can you tell if a dog “has pitbull in its heritage?” Because without proper papers, and most dogs don’t have them, you can’t tell. Or do you use Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” method? Pretty arbitrary when a dog’s life is involved.
So you’re saying that a) only ‘some’ pit-bull type owners have this tendency, and / or b) apparently only pit-bull types end up savaging little kids when they have shitty owners.
Firstly, just to clear the waters, I would not propose killing any dogs currently living, unless of course they had attacked someone. I would call for the same outcome for **any **individual dog, regardless of breed.
For the rest, there’s this thing called common-fucking-sense. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about the pitbull dog, unlike (for example) a kelpie or border collie who are bred for working. Unless you are actually breeding pits for fighting, there is no reason to keep the breed going. What the fuck would be wrong in introducing laws (and perhaps extra incentives) to ensure that all dogs are neutered? It won’t bring immediate results, but what are the alternatives?
I just don’t get why people like yourself (who are otherwise normal and decent folk) get all pissy about their precious pitbulls when the facts are they are disproportionately responsible for more serious and fatal attacks the world over. There is something about the inherent character of the dogs, decent owners or otherwise, that predisposes them to go nuts. And when they do, the results are more often catastrophic.
Cites for your claim that only pit bull owners are disproportionately prone to be irresponsible in such a way that leads to pit bulls chewing kids to death.
Basically what you’re saying is you’re a shitty owner - and your naive ‘I love my pits even more than goldens and they’re just lovey-dovey animals and they would never ever hurt anyone’ attitude should scare the shit out of anyone around you. It’s exactly the kind of ‘oh my dogs are fine because I’m such a wonderful owner’ attitude that gets people bitten. Or worse.
With all due respect, kambuckta, you are tossing around terms as though they mean something different than what they actually do mean.
Starting with:
You appear to believe that your opinion defines common sense, at least on this topic, and it very clearly does not even come close:
If there is any real “common” sense on this topic, in the sense of commonly held views, these threads demonstrate a more common understanding and view that pit bulls are terrific dogs that don’t deserve to be driven out of existence. But the very fact of so much disagreement and debate makes it clear that “common sense” is not an applicable term to this topic at all.
Next…
There is nothing intrinsically valuable about a border collie. The value that it has as a working dog is extrinsic, and specifically dependent on a shepherd needing it. Absent that shepherd, a border collie’s value is no different than the value of a cocker spaniel, or a boxer, or a mutt, or a pit bull: the value of each is determined by the human beings they live with or belong to, and you are not the arbiter of whether shepherding is a better or more worthy standard than being a companion animal.
As a society, we have collectively agreed that dogs in general are valuable to us, and we have basic rules and laws that reflect that society-level agreement. But the ways in which dogs are valued is left to us all to determine for ourselves, and the vast majority of dogs do not work, they are companions.
Nothing, and I support it, in light of the fact that our country and the world is overrun with unwanted dogs of every description. But making it specific to any breed with the goal of eliminating that breed? No. It is pointless for changing the behavior of people who want powerful dogs for unsavory reasons, since they have always found a breed to fill that niche. And it is completely unjustified and unfair to the people who value pit bulls for their excellent positive qualities, especially since they far outnumber the shmucks and their dogs.
So failing to share your willfully ignorant, unsupported generalizations and instead choosing to pay attention to professionals, research, data, science and experience makes someone abnormal and indecent? Refuting baseless and hysterical assertions with research and data is being pissy?
First, please cite the data and research underlying your assertions of “serious” and “the world over”.
As for “disproportionate” - that’s meaningless by itself. No matter whose estimates we’re using for total numbers of pit bulls, we’re talking about MILLIONS of dogs vs. a couple dozen fatalities. What is grossly disproportionate is reactions like yours to these numbers.
You are making things up. There’s nothing even close to “some dogs (of whatever breed) are just predisposed to unpredictable, violent insanity” on the list of reasons for dog attacks that have been researched and compiled by the CDC, the American Veterinary Association, ASPCA, Humane Society or any other reputable, professional organization.
There are reasons, and you just continue to ignore them. Which makes your admonition:
more than a little ironic, given the lack of respect you give to your own brain’s ability to learn, and reason, vs. simply reacting to emotions.
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