This is a poll, and what is being polled is opinions.
I wouldn’t worry about it; I’d keep an eye out no matter what breed, but that’s just as much to make sure my kids don’t bug the dog as the other way around.
We have a Lab/Akita mix, and he likes to roughhouse, so my kids are used to it and wouldn’t be afraid.
Yup. And I’d have my kids approach the dog carefully, from the front, with the owner there, so that the dog knows they’re welcome guests. That’s the way you should do it with any dog.
I would be less likely to leave them alone with the dog than with a very small dog because the pit bull can inflict so much more injury than a very small dog.
I mean, I wouldn’t leave very little kids alone with a dog usually anyway, because little kids’ behaviour sometimes scares dogs, making them snap. I don’t mean pulling the dog’s tail, but running around, squealing, throwing their arms up suddenly, etc; also, they’re much more likely to have their face at a level where a dog that turns round and snaps momentarily is going to cause permanent damage.
I’ve never actually met a put bull because they’re banned in the UK. I’ve met loads of staffies, which are similar; they tend to be really good with humans. But they are a hell of a lot stronger than, say, a Jack Russel. That sudden snap is more likely to hurt more from a pit bull than most other dogs.
I am more careful with my dog, the aforementioned Jack Russel, around unknown staffies, because, like someone above said, they were bred as fighting dogs and they really are likely to attack. Fortunately, all the staffie owners I’ve met while out dogwalking are well aware if their dog doesn’t like other dogs and they’re very quick to put them on a lead if they were on their own in a park and then my dog turns up.
Sorry, I took that as an insult, which I’m ok with.
Edit: Not insulted by you, but by the previous poster.
In the interest of fighting ignorance…here’s aCDC .pdf listing in detail fatalities due to dog bites from 1979-1999 (granted a bit dated.) While quite a few of the dogs are indeed pit bulls, correlation does not = causation. Almost every dog that killed a person was an untrained/ unsocialized/outdoor/chained/isolated/frustrated animal.
Pit bulls score very highly inATTS scores (I’ve done this test with a Rottweiler, it is a pretty well designed and well-executed test IMO.) Higher than many other breeds, given the large number tested. Results of first page under American Pit Bull Terrier.
One more study (abstract.)
I do think ANY large/high drive/tend to be dominant dog, regardless of breed, requires a higher level of responsibility, training and general stewardship than, say, a Bichon or pointer. But ANY dog can bite and inflict quite a bit of damage. It’s really unfortunate that “bad boy” breeds like pit bulls and such tend to be favored by irresponsible owners.
Given that humans fear, demonize, kill, torture, fight, abuse and neglect pit bulls by the thousands on a daily basis, it’s a testament to basic canine good nature that pit bulls are typically such generally sweet dogs with people.
Good because it was an insult, or at least as close to one as I can come without being in violation of the rules. Your opinion is based upon ignorance, irrationality, and media fearmongering. When you espouse said opinion, you are spreading the disease around, and that deserves nothing but scorn.
Very true. Here’s an anecdote for the fighting of ignorance: Michael Vick’s dogs. 47 dogs survived the seizure of the Bad Newz Kennels. These were actual fought dogs, bait dogs, and in most cases highly abused and neglected dogs. One - ONE - had to be euthanized for aggression. One had to be euthanized for health issues.
Most of these dogs have been placed in adoptive homes, with actual families. Most of them have earned their CGC and several of them work in the public as therapy dogs. Some are still at Best Friend’s Animal Sanctuary, too damaged to live in individual homes but still living happily with other dogs and interacting with people.
These are pit bulls who human beings basically did their worst to (seriously, read the case information - it wasn’t “just” dog fighting, many of the dogs were physically tortured by human beings, forcibly bred, and many many corpses were found on-site) and the vast majority of them turned out to be loving, normal dogs.
I’ve worked tangentially (ie not as an official member) with several groups who are instrumental in removing pit bulls and other - bait - animals from dangerous situations in Flint, Michigan. Dead chained dogs in fight houses or left like trash in the back yard, skeletons and rotting dogs left behind and the kids in the neighvborhood talk about avoiding a certain block or property while the stench is really bad, litters of puppies stuffed into garbage sacks or five-gallon buckets of water to die, fight houses with stacks of crates and traps inside for catching stray cats and dogs for bait, I have talked to little kids who have watched fights or training or rape-rack forced breeding, have chased down stray dogs to get them before the fighters do, have stolen dogs and puppies from back yards…
It’s not pretty. It is horrible and heartbreaking. The saddest thing is talking to little kids who see this stuff and assume it’s normal behaviour.
And the amazing thing is, almost without exception the dogs picked up by over-burdened rescues and volunteers are perhaps afraid but almost unfailingly sweet and absolutely desperate for attention and affection.
Hence my reason for the poll. I’m looking for perceptions people have about these dogs, not logical, well reasoned responses.
My perception at the time of the poll was that they were angry, strong and terrible dogs. My poll results show that most feel otherwise. As such, I need to look at this in a new light, which I will. Thankfully, others provided information instead of being wound up in emotion, like yourself.
Exactly.
Unless the dog was a chihuahua. Then I’d leave regardless of temperament.
Quite a few? Did you read the last couple of pages?
When you examine what dogs were involved in fatal bitings (some deaths involved multiple dogs) just pitbulls and rottweilers alone account for 68% of the human bite fatalities in that 20 year span. When you parse out how many of the deaths the two breeds account for between the two of them, 64% were caused by the pitbulls and 36% by the rottweilers…all by themselves pitbulls were involved in 49.57% of all the deaths.
The CDC has more or less disowned that study because people were using it to conclude that pitbulls were killing machines. The CDC released this note in 2008:
“[The 2000 study] does not identify specific breeds that are most likely to bite or kill, and thus is not appropriate for policy-making decisions related to the topic. Each year, 4.7 million Americans are bitten by dogs. These bites result in approximately 16 fatalities; about 0.0002 percent of the total number of people bitten. These relatively few fatalities offer the only available information about breeds involved in dog bites. There is currently no accurate way to identify the number of dogs of a particular breed, and consequently no measure to determine which breeds are more likely to bite or kill.”
http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Dog-Bites/dogbite-factsheet.html
OK, I’m an idiot…the CDC link I posted isn’t the one I thought it was. And, I can’t find the link I actually intended to post. :smack: I’m sorry.
The one I intended to post listed in detail the particulars of a large number of dog-bite fatalities. The conclusion was that the common thread in the breed/mixes was not the breed of dog, but the circumstances: dogs were either running in packs, chained up 24/7, and almost all had received little or no training, little or no veterinary attention, little or no socialization, and in many cases the fatality was due to inattentive caregivers not paying attention to children going into yards with chained dogs.
In other words: the relevant common thread was not so much the breed, but the irresponsibility of the owners.
I have in my life owned two dogs (I’ve owned and cared for lots of dogs) that I considered unsafe around children, small running squeaky dogs, strange cats, etc. One a female Rottweiler I got from the shelter, the other a Lab-something mix. Never had an incident in cumulatively 19 years because I was careful to control both dogs; I knew what might set each off and simply never put them in a situation that might trigger prey or aggressive behaviour. It’s not rocket science.
The only problem with pit bulls is that they tend to be owned by the wrong sort of people. A disproportionately large number of pit-bull owners are the kind of folk who want their dog to be a killer, and since pit bulls are the ones with that reputation, that’s what they get. If my co-worker were that sort of person, though, I would never have been friendly with them to begin with, certainly not enough that I would accept an invitation to their house. And pit bulls owned by decent people are no worse than any other dog owned by decent people.
I would be on my guard, but that wouldn’t be reflective of the breed of dog. I’d be cautious with my (hypothetical) children around any strange dog whose temperament I wasn’t familiar with. I’m embarrassed to say, but I grew up with all cats and dogs make me a little bit nervous because I don’t know them well and thus can’t really read their behavior. The ones I knew as a small child were all poorly-trained jumpers who liked to careen into people as a way of greeting so I still expect that, which is a little unpleasant.
One of the nastiest dogs I’ve ever known was a yippy little Yorkie who likes to lunge and bite people without provocation. He belongs to one of the faculty in my department and she sometimes brings him in. I had to walk one of the 4-year-olds in our on-site preschool program to the bathroom one morning and this dog was in the hall with his owner. I moved so I was between the dog and the kid as we went by. I felt bad, since the owner is a nice lady, but her dog is a yappy, irritable nuisance who’s already bitten several people and I wasn’t risking any little kid becoming his next victim.
Thanks, Justin_Bailey. In case it’s not obvious to readers, there are at least 3 flaws with the science of that CDC study.
[ul]
[li]As the note mentioned, no one knows what proportion of total dogs belong to a particular breed.[/li][li]Dog bites are notoriously badly reported. In cases that are serious enough to get reported, there’s both an incentive to claim the most dramatic story possible (“It was a pit bull! a big one! I fought him off with a toothbrush!”) and a tendency by both victims and the press to assume any dog of unknown breed that bit must have been a pit bull.[/li][li]Lastly, that study uses a broad catchall term, “pit-bull type dogs” for one category, and very narrow characterizations for other breeds, i.e., “cocker spaniel” and not “spaniel-type dogs.” Since “pit-bull-type dogs” are a vaguely-defined group, it’s possible, even likely, that it’s a much larger pool of dogs to draw from than “cocker spaniels.”[/li][/ul]
I just finished reading The Lost Dogs, by Jim Gorant, about the Vick dogs. The one dog euthanized for aggression wasn’t a fighter per se, she was a breeder who appeared to have had her health broken down whelping multiple litters. Considering the property included the notorious “rape stands” for forced breeding, it’s possible this dog was pretty much driven insane by “rape” and abuse – i.e., this is a different situation than the crazed fighting dog one might have imagined.
There’s another interesting statistical point to be made about the difficulty of getting these supposed monsters to be aggressive.
There were 48 dogs seized. In the “agreement of facts” between Vick (and co-defendants) and the government, there were nine dogs whose deaths were specifically described, and an unspecified number of additional dogs Vick admitted to having killed previously. Although no one seems to have an exact figure as to how many that would add to the total, it’s probably conservative to estimate that 70 pit bulls passed through Bad Newz Kennels’ “system” of brutality and aggression training. These dogs were selected to be fighters or to breed fighters, and were put through an intensive course of behavior modification to make them fight other dogs aggressively. (Vick hired a more experienced dogfighter as a consultant to help set up the regimen.)
Of those roughly 70-odd dogs, Vick’s crew got 5 to enter the pit to fight, but only one of them won any fights. That’s only one out of 70 that was any “good” at fighting.
Interestingly, most sources in the United States that I’ve seen define the term “pit bull” as any dog of three closely related breeds:
[ul]
[li]American Pit Bull Terrier (APBT)[/li][li]American Staffordshire Terrier (AmStaff)[/li][li]Staffordshire Bull Terrier (Staffybull or Staffie)[/li][/ul]
So a lot of folks here already consider your staffies “pit bulls.”
I’m not denying an APBT is stronger and somewhat larger than a JRT. It might come as a surprise, however, to note that there’s at least one case of a Jack Russell Terrier killing a human being, Justin Mozer. (More detail here.)
As a generalization, fatal dog attacks tend to have several common factors:
[ul][li]Unsupervised child(ren)[/li][li]Un-neutered male dog(s)[/li][li]Chained or tethered dog(s)[/li][li]Territoriality – when someone ignores a dog’s warnings and intrudes on turf a dog is trained or expected to defend[/ul][/li]
Some experts have described that last issue as one of “resident” vs “family” dogs – a resident dog is present on the property but not routinely socialized as a family member (typically a guard dog or one used in breeding).
That’s ridiculous. I mean the classification, not your post.
No, I’m not surprised, but it is only one incident, which is even less statistically significant than the stuff that people who hate pitbulls trot out.
Funnily enough, when I see threads (here and elsewhere) where people end up defending pit-bulls or staffies, they very often end up having a go at JRTs instead. This is annoying - saying one breed is horrible is now better than saying another breed is horrible. I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, btw!
FTR, in my post above I wrote that the staffies are likely to attack my dog; I meant more likely. Still not very likely at all, but the idea that staffies are much more people-friendly than dog-friendly isn’t completely without basis.
The dog I look after has been attacked twice by staffies while they ignore my dog; I think this is because my foster dog is a lab cross and large enough for them to consider her a threat. But I don’t consider this as a reason for thinking staffies are more likely to attack, exactly; there are more staffies round here than another breed, so naturally it’s more likely that attacks will come from the commonest breed.
More evidence: A vicious pitbull brutalizing a duckling.
And yet another reminder of what can happen when a small child is left alone in reach of a bull terrier. (*graphic image)
Certainly they should not have their own pet kitten because they will let the kitten win all fights and turn the cat into a menace.