But it is the pit bulls themselves or just that the people who want a “macho”/vicious dog, and have the tendency to abuse/mistreat/or just plain not look properly after their dogs go towards pit bulls? If there’s the idea that one breed is dangerous and good for fighting, then someone who wants to appear “tough” will look for one of that breed, probably not care properly for the animal, and then when it attacks someone the cycle will start all over again.
The problem with your data is that it doesn’t tell us how many attacks were made per head of dog. In other words, if 100 Pit Bulldogs and 100 Collies lived in the U.S., and 10 PBs attacked while 5 Collies did, then we can say that the PB was responsible for more attacks. OTOH, if the population was 100 PBs and 50 Collies, and 10 PBs attacked vs. 5 Collies, the percentage of attacks would be the same for both groups, even though there were more PB attacks.
So, if Pit Bulls do not by far constitute the highest percentage of dogs for any individual breed, we’d conclude they were dangerous, at least more dangerous than average, right?
In the Detroit area ,there is so much dog fighting going on ,you better be wary of any pitt bull you encounter. The animal channel says when the Humane Socity odf Detroit picks a pitt bull up,they immediately put it down. If you want to dog fight, the Pitt is your dog of choice.
I have walked in the park a long time. All but one incident has involved a pitt.
If Pit Bulls were committing more attacks per head than other breeds, I would think that they were more likely to attack than other breeds, yes. I don’t know much about the population of different dog breeds, so I’m no expert.
Presa Canario. Apparently, according to the article, related to Mastiffs.
This breed was in the news a few years ago when a lady was killed.
To earlier “Beagle in the garbage can” poster: this would have been my strategy if I had been walking my little border collie rather than my 90-lb lab 
I’m thinking about carrying pepper spray or something of the like. I really, really wish that I could believe that pit bulls aren’t dangerous, but I’ve had too many bad experiences. Yes, I’ve had other dogs attack my dogs (especially in the heat of a dog park fight), but they didn’t try to actually kill my dog. One of my friends has a PB that’s one of the sweetest people dogs I’ve met, but I still refuse to bring any of my doggies over for a play date.
Labrador Retrievers are by far the most popular breed, though as I recall, mongrels still outnumber them. Here’s a listing. The first listing for a Pit Bull that I can see, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, is 85th on the list. If the earlier stats are accurate, Pit Bulls are responsible for an extremely disproportionate number of attacks. Labs, who would lead the list of attacks I suppose, all other things being equal (which they are not, obviously), are famously good-natured dogs. Their number one ranking is directly related to this:
I’d suggest that as a group, people purchase Pit Bulls for reasons other than their lovely temperament.
Pit Bulls simply cannot be trusted, even when in a nurturing, caring, disciplined environment. It is in their blood to fight, it’s what they were bred for, it’s an instinct that they cannot ignore and can be triggered at any time for inexplicable reasons.
I’m sure that the likelihood of Pits being mean and aggressive goes sharply up in direct proportion to the malfesance of their owners, but even under ideal ownership conditions they are still very dangerous due to their combination of musculature, jaw strength and unpredictability.
I own a boxer whos a pup, now about 9 months old and around 75 pounds of pure muscle. In some ways, Boxers are similar to Pits but they have a more tolerant (read: with children!) personality and are pretty playful dogs. I have had to demonstrate my Alpha-status with him a couple times so far, and expect him to challenge me a couple more times in the future until he settles into adulthood.
Some Boxers are pretty fearsome looking, as are Pits, but Pits (and to a lesser extent, Rotties) carry the day in biting attacks that result in serious injury and the occaisonal fatality (to other dogs AND people).
Wow. I knew Labs were popular, but number one for 10 years? That’s impressive.
Agreed. I apologize for contradicting my self here, but now that I’ve thought about it a bit, we could almost infer that from the statistic of “one-third” of attacks. It’s obvious that no one breed makes up one-third of the American dog population (excepting mongrels perhaps).
In defense of owners with dogs off-leash, you can not train a dog to voice and hand commands while it is on the leash. You train in the house, you train in the yard, you train in public, because at some point your dog will be off leash in a very tempting situation, and you want it to be trained to stop, sit, and come by voice.
You dog probably will not be severely tempted in the living room.
Of course, a sensible person trains the dog off-leash at five in the morning in an area where no-one jogs, and socializes the dog first.
My dog was attack by a bull dog in a park once; I didn’t blame the owner or the dog. He walked his dog there every day; I never did. The dog was startled, and attacked. He responded pretty quickly to a voice command, and calmed down; I pet him. The owner gave me his contact information in case my dog was seriously hurt.
And he said, ‘I’m so sorry, this never happened before.’ Me, I believed him.
Now I would never walk a dog with the jaw musculature of a Rottwheiler or a bull dog around a blind corner on a narrow path without a leash. That was stupid.
Some dogs are aggressive and strong-willed; some dogs are bred for aggression; some dogs are bred for damned strong jaw muscles. These dogs should not be owned by people who can’t be Alphas, and being an alpha means constantly reinforcing pack order. If you can’t stop you dog immediately by command, you shouldn’t own anything bigger than a Sheltie.
[Unless it’s a bird dog; bird dogs have gentle jaws.]
What is the aversion to putting a dog on a leash? I just do not get it. There is nothing inhumane about it. Explain this to me. I don’t care what breed your dog is, or how well behaved it is. They are dogs. They are instinctive. Put them on a flipping leash. Please allow the rest of us to walk out dogs, on a leash, without fear of being attacked. It isn’t rocket science.
with ouR dogs
I don’t like Pit Bulls at all, but this is sound reasoning for a large-breed training regimen vis a vis who’s in charge.
I establish dominance over my 75lb Boxer pup by acting like a superior dog. I’ll get down with him and grasp his windpipe and growl at him if necessary.
People that think I’m crazy have never owned a large-breed male dog.
My mom has a dog that’s 3/4 timber wolf and 1/4 malamute - we lived in Montana, remember! He’s so damn smart, he was constantly challenging his status in the pack when he was a youth. I had to do as you suggested several times - hold him down by the ruff of his neck and growl - I didn’t live at home, so he just assumed I could be pushed around. Finally, I literally grabbed him and threw him down (not hard, but enough that he felt it) and held him down growling until he stopped moving, then let him up. After that he gave up trying to be the alpha or the beta and was quite happy being the junior dog and stopped trying to push me around. He’s the sweetest dog ever now, as an adult, but it took a conscious program of socialization and taking him out visiting people and an absolute control over him when in any multiple-dog situation, all on our vet’s orders. Now he’s senior dog and lovely and friendly and just great - but he’s 15 years old now. When he was a puppy he weighed in at about 130lbs or so and was fast, smart, and tough - he could have done serious damage to me or another person or dog very easily. We never ever gave him the chance.
It’s about knowing the breed, knowing the risks associated with that breed, and acting appropriately. You have a pit bull or rottweiler, you know they’re bred for fighting and killing - you don’t have them around kids, you keep them on a lead if there is any doubt at all, you watch them and monitor their behavior all the time, and you don’t give them a chance to attack another person or dog. What you don’t do is assume they’re a sweet nice dog and all will be well and ignore all the warnings and hope for the best.
This sort of thing is why I’m so adamantly opposed to selling dogs in pet stores and to backyard breeding. A good breeder, rescue group, or shelter would ask some screening questions before letting someone get a dog, and that might keep dogs out of the hands of some of these idiots who should not have a dog. People who hit their dogs or who let dogs with aggression problems off-leash definitely qualify as “people who should not have a dog”. It’s a very bad idea to let anyone have a dog who can come up with the money to pay for it, and the stories in this thread illustrate why.
Both my beagles are rescued. Nordberg was chained up in a yard with a heavy chain. Her neck was a mess. It took 2 years for her hair to grow back. She is the sweetest animal I have ever seen. Horrible neglect. She was emaciated.
Quincy was beaten. He had a missing tooth and another was cracked. He had to have that removed. He was thrown and when he had a sore neck last year ,xrays revealed he had shot in his chest. He went through torture. When we tried to toilet train him my wife yelled ,what did you do,bad doggie etc. He stood up to her. He refused to be hit again. I calmed him down took him in the yard and pet him. Within 2 days he got it and never made an accident again.
So there are people out there that can abuse a beagle puppy. They are the cutest and most loving animals possible. Yet they were torturing them. Many sickos have dogs.
Mosier, the first site you cited, dogbitelaw, is an advocacy site. There’s nothign wrong with citing an advocacy cite, so I hope you’re just as open to pit bull advocacy information.
The cite from Wikipedia is problematical. I’m not a Wikipedia-basher, but this is one of the times the source material serves us better than Wiki:
The CDC itself does link to that aging study you cited. But they’ve added language specifically disavowing the implications that the study shows anything scientific about breed tendencies:
That study was famously flawed. Like most of the inflammatory information you’ll find on this topic, the study did not define “pit bulls” in any scientific or consistent way. It relied on reported breed data from parties who were not objective. It made no inquiry into the number of pit bulls, or any breeds, in the country. Any dog present in large numbers will have skewed representation in such stats, and pit bull types are wildly popular currently…but no one has figures. lastly, the CDC study did not capture most bites by small dogs, which are underreported for several reasons, ranging from lack of major damage to embarrassment – few men want to report being bitten by a teacup poodle. Fortunatelty the CDC has recognized the flaws in its own study and the ways the study was being misused to advocate breed bans, and posted important correctives.
For a very thorough analysis of the flaws in applying this old, partly-disavowed CDC study to regulating pit bulls, see (you knew an advocacy site was coming!) here. If you have the patience to read through it, it’s illuminating.
Sailboat
Agreed, and I’ll add to that keeping the dog in the yard, either via some sort of fencing or a dog run, both for their own safety and the good of the neighbourhood. My neighbour’s golden retriever has been hit by cars on multiple occasions, including at least one instance in front of the other neighbour’s kids (who often play with her). Then there’s the black lab who was also left off-leash and eventually turned aggressive–at that point they started to keep him tied, but not before he had attacked a couple people. My mother had issues at one point with their dogs (at the time they had the black lab, and had family over with his husky, who was the main problem) using her trees as bathrooms, which suffice it to say was not healthy for them. Not to mention we often had our own beagle (incidentally rescued from these same neighbours, and also the smallest dog I ever knew them to own) tied in the back yard, so we certainly had concerns about those dogs harassing him.
Some people just shouldn’t be allowed to have dogs.
“Pit bulls” is a confusing term in and of itself. Genrally, three breeds are considered “pit bulls”: the American Pit Bull Terrier, the American Staffordshire Terrier, and the Staffordshire Bull Terrier (“the British one”). But there’s a lot of confusion among the “bully breeds” descended from ancestral “Molosser dogs” (bullgdogs and mastiffs are in this group).
With all due respect, pit bulls used to be called “nanny dogs” and were more trusted around young children than other breeds. I’m talking back in “Little Rascals” times.
Pit bulls are actually famous among knowlegedable dog handlers for being people-friendly, not human-aggressive. People who have valuable breeding lines (and I am NOT supporting breeding, just bringing up something I’ve read) say they keep OTHER dogs – guarding breeds like German Shepherds – to guard their kennels, because the pits will get into anyone’s car quite happily.
As a generalization, pit bulls can be dog-aggressive, sometimes extremely so, and should be regarded as potentially dog-aggressive for safety’s sake, although individuals differ. But (outside the media circus and offline) they are NOT normally human-aggressive…unless of course trained to be that way, which is where human evil steps in, but let’s distinguish between that and an inherent part of the dogs’ nature.
Allegedly, the reason pit bulls are as famously NOT human-aggressive as they are is that dogfighters used to need to be able to reach into a pit bull fight and separate the dogs without being bitten. Supposedly it’s more dangerous to a human to break up a fight between non-pit-bull dogs who might redirect agrression onto a human during their excitement. I don’t know if that’s entirely true – I haven’t been to any dog fights, nor do I plan to – but I can say for the record that I’ve never suffered, nor witnessed, any injuries of any kind dealt to a human by a pit bull who was playing, scrapping, barking at, or expressing aggression toward another dog (of any type).
Although mine weren’t in any serious fights, they instantly submit whenever I separate them for playing too roughly, so far no matter how excited they are.
Now, I’ve seen dings and received them myself from playing with an excited pit bull, but those were entirely accidental, and you should see the pitiful look my little one gives me if she grazes my knuckle during tug-of-war.
Supposedly another reason pit bulls are good with children is that they’re bred to ignore pain and stay “on mission,” so that kids poking and pulling on them do not trigger any defensive response – the pit put up with a lot of rough play.
But to get back to the your quote, in general, one shouldn’t leave ANY breed of dog unsupervised with children. I apologize for using a secondary source for the following article, but it seems to have dropped off the original news site that posted it, so I have to rely on a secondary archive:
Jack Russell Terrier Kills Infant.
They’re ALL dangerous – just like tap water, electricity, venetian blind cords, bleach, forks, stairwells, and many other things we have around the house. Supervise!
Totally agree.
There is, however, something wrong with posting in a hurry. I should have said “nothing wrong with citing an advocacy site.”
Sailboat