# The "Pit Bull" Myth **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 23, 2009, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-pit-bull-myth/518682 "2009-11-23T19:55:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 3
**Author:** ![NajaNivea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/22d042/32.png) [@NajaNivea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NajaNivea)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2009, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-pit-bull-myth/518682/3 "2009-11-23T20:14:34Z")
> [@I met a Pit Bull Terrier today.....](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-met-a-pit-bull-terrier-today/518225/120): > > I can see how it could be read that way. I do not doubt misidentification exists on some level. I doubt that it exists in the extreme that some claim, but this is only a doubt - the sort of healthy skepticism most here posess when faced with oft repeated rarely substantiated claims. Maybe the misdeintifcation is worse. Maybe there are people report a King Charles Spaniel (snappy little fucks) bite as a pit attack. It is worse. That’s… what we’ve all been trying to show you, with little effect. For the sake of expediency, I’m copying this text directly out of the [last discussion](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11684131&postcount=225) (with a corrected typo and a better photo link): The concept of random-source mixed-breed dogs being generally unidentifiable doesn’t mean you can never tell two breeds of dogs apart, or that a pit bull mixed with a boxer is suddenly, magically, going to turn out puppies that look like poodles. Mixed-breed dogs are rarely the accidental and random product of two known and excellent examples of intentionally-produced pedigreed dogs. They’re often many generations into random breeding when they show up at the shelter. The generic form that’s come to be known as “pit bull type” is kinda the distillation that happens when you have a random population of random-type dogs breeding randomly, with a healthy push in the direction of “bulldog type” caused by a population boom in pit-type dogs after the early HSUS/media frenzy. Without the “bulldog” influence, what you get [looks something](http://www.greatdogsite.com/watermark/Carolina%20Dog-8%20months-Brown-1187153031.jpg) [like this](http://www.californiacarolinadogs.com/update09-30-02/6large.jpg). It’s not hard to see what happens if you toss a glut of bulldog-type blood into the mix a few generations back, and how we’ve come to label just about every generic pound puppy a “pit bull type”. In any case, the product of two different purebreds doesn’t always look anything like either parent, either. An F1 generation cross between a lab and a poodle does not give you a consistent “labradoodle”. Complicating the issue is that the general public can’t identify more than a dozen or couple dozen common breeds at most. Even in the professional dog world where presumably people have a better eye, people get away with all kinds of stupid things… like falsifying pedigrees and passing off one breed as another, or a mix as a purebred. Even a very practiced eye would likely have difficulty differentiating these [two](http://www.whiteknightabs.com/images/Chaos-jj-Missy_american_bulldog_old_southern_white_white_english_bulldog.jpg) [dogs](http://www.rawdogleather.com/simon.jpg) as separate breeds. Neither one is a pit bull, by the way. One reason “pit bulls” show up so often in the roster of severe dog attacks is because the “pit bull type” is pretty much our default generic dog phenotype. Everything looks vaguely like a pit bull, a couple generations down the road, and everyone thinks they know what a pit bull looks like. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-pit-bull-myth/518682)._